Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930

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 uninju...