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.
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