Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 44
40
Popular Culture Review
able; far better it is to commit any number of petty crimes than to be guilty of the
sin of growing fat.” (Brumberg 243). By the mid-twenties evidence of widespread
excessive dieting prompted the American Medical Association and The Delinea
tor magazine to co-sponsor a Weight Conference. Prominent physicians produced
evidence that “many of our flappers” maintained their slender form by “inducing
regurgitation after a plentiful meal,” or by taking “high colonic irrigations (en
emas), cathartics, and iodine in the effort to reduce.” (Brumberg 243-248). Doc
tors at the Weight Conference expressed concern that young women who reduced
to the point of emaciation risked cessation of menses. But it was not only fashion
conscious flappers (sophisticated young adults embodying a Jazz Age passion for
pleasure) who dieted to excess. A letter to the editor of The Delineator from a
sixteen-year-old high school girl demonstrates a similar obsession among adoles
cent girls. Pleading for advice on how to lose enough weight so she can “wear
pretty dresses at (her) graduation like the other girls,” she explains the reason for
her concern. “You will know I am a sight, because I am five feet five inches tall
and weigh one hundred and sixteen pounds” (The Delineator, June 1926, 26).
For many women dieting had become a fact of life by the 1920s. Joan Jacobs
Brumberg’s work on anorexia nervosa marks the twentieth century as the era when
“the body - not the face - became the special focus of female beauty.” Associating
modern-day anorexia with young, attractive and wealthy females, Brumberg docu
ments dieting to excess in the prosperous 1920s. But the desire for slimness was
apparently not confined to youthful sociali ѕ̸