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