|
|
Product Description
Winner of the Bridgewater State College Class of 1950 Distinguished Faculty Research Award
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as young women began entering college in greater numbers than ever before, physicians and social critics charged that campus life posed grave hazards to the female constitution and women's reproductive health. "A girl could study and learn," Dr. Edward Clarke warned in his widely read 1873 book Sex in Education, "but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health, and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system." For half a century, ideas such as Dr. Clarke's framed the debate over a woman's place in higher education almost exclusively in terms of her body and her health.
For historian Margaret A. Lowe, this obsession offers one of the clearest expressions of the social and cultural meanings given to the female body between 1875 and 1930. At the same time, the "college girl" was a novelty that tested new ideas about feminine beauty, sexuality, and athleticism. In Looking Good, Lowe examines the ways in which college women at three quite different institutions―Cornell University, Smith College, and Spelman College―regarded their own bodies in this period. Contrasting white and black students, single-sex and coeducational schools, secular and religious environments, and Northern and Southern attitudes, Lowe draws on student diaries, letters, and publications; institutional records; and accounts in the popular press to examine the process by which new, twentieth-century ideals of the female body took hold in America.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation
- Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women
- Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (Gender and American Culture)
- Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women. Volume 2, From 1865 to the Present
- Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity (Intersections)
- Women's America: Refocusing the Past
- Modern American Women: A Documentary History
- By Susan Ware - Modern American Women: A Documentary History: 2nd (second) Edition
- Sisters In Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History
- Skyscraper (Femmes Fatales)
*If this is not the "Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 (Gender Relations in the American Experience)" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Jun 30, 2024 22:00 +08.
