Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold. Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives. Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection. She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.
Some time ago we received a comment here from a reader, and the reader emailed me after the recent item on fashion, and reminded me that I said I'd do a threat on the topic.
So here it is.
The threads were these ones:
The comment was this one:
I read this, and your other post on Fran Camuglia. Wow, what a sad life.
I have an observation that I wonder if you would comment on that your post seems to illustrate. The pretty girls of the 50s and 60s looked different than they do now. They were beautiful, but softer, and more natural looking. Even the real dolls like Camuglia, with their exaggerated features, were softer and prettier. Think Marilyn Monroe.
I don't know what's changed it, but maybe the emphasis on "working out" has. Seems like you have really fit girls, and then really out of shape girls, and not much in between.
My replies were:
Thanks for your comment. Her life was tragic.
On your observation, people do indeed look different at different ages in the past, but I haven't really thought of it in this context. Having thought of it now, a little, I think there's something to your observation. As a minor personal observation, "working out" was not really a thing, as you note, in the 70s when I was growing up. Thinking back to high school I can't really think of any overweight kids at all. I'm sure there were some, but it must have been really rare. It seems to me that high schoolers now look older than we did when we were there, but oddly kids of my fathers vintage, who graduated high school in the 40s, looked much more mature. Nobody looked bulked up, or "ripped", or whatever.
This might be worth a post on the site, after I ponder it a bit.By the way, while I've already noted it in these posts, her life being tragic isn't unique in terms of Playboy centerfolds. Quite a few of their stories are pretty grim, and Playboy contributed to that. In this case, quite frankly, she was off to a really bad start as it was, as she was married absurdly young, divorced very rapidly, and objectified forever when still in her teens.
I noted that it might be worth a post at the time, and then I went on to other things. The email reminded me of it.
Well, in thinking about it, and I have no real scientific way to discuss this, my observational comment is, on this question, while I think there are some morphological changes we can observe in women, there aren't really that many.
That's probably surprising.
Let's start off with a couple of things, the first being that the first part of our discussion necessarily references young women. That's important, I think, for reasons that will become clear.
The second observation is that time period and method of illustration matters. We're not really going to get, for example, very accurate depictions of women, or men, at a certain point in our past.
Let's start with that.
A lot of comments like this, and I've seen them before, are based on photographs. I.e., in this case, somebody is looking at a photograph of a Playboy model from 1967 and drawing conclusions from that. But can we?
Probably not.
Most early photography was in the category of portraiture. Old portraits give us a much more realistic idea of what people looked like than "published" photographs do. And certainly better than pornography does. Indeed, that's one of the fundamental destructive aspects of pornography, which we'll get into later.
Anyhow, cameras had to develop for quite some time before snapshots or the like appeared. In the meantime, illustration really developed and that gives us a pretty good idea of what standards of beauty were up to at least 1920. Illustration made use of models, who were chosen for their physical appearance, but they rarely strayed massively from the mean. The first real "standard" was Florence Evelyn Nesbit, who became the Gibson Girl. She was pretty, to be sure, but didn't depart from the mean in a massive fashion
This was equally true of lesser known models, and indeed, it was mostly true for early movie stars as well.
Movies began to take over from illustrations as the bearers of standards in the 1920s and certainly had by the 1930s. Female movie stars began to be more and more chosen for their beauty as well as their acting talents by the late 1930ss, which did result in an exaggerated standard in the sense that not every woman you meet is going to look like a movie start.
Teenage girls with cameras in the 1930s.
Actress Susan Hayword as a Yank centerfold.
But, nonetheless, while they were pretty, only in very rare instances were they somebody whom you might not meet, appearance wise, at the Piggly Wiggly.
Lauren Bacall as a teenager.
It wasn't until the 1950s that this really began to change.
Starting in the 1950s, and I'll place the date as 1953 when the first issue of Playboy came out, the beauty standard became emphasized and highly exaggerated in terms of physical features. The first Playboy centerfold was Marilyn Monroe, against her will, and her features in some ways became the standard.
Or rather her imagined features.
Playboy emphaszied the supposed "girl next store" with teh concept htat she'd lost her moral compass, was sterile, stupid, and very top heavy. Marilyn Monroe's early movies, indeed the bulk of them, portrayed characters just like that. The funny thing is that Monroe's own early modeling photographs didn't depict her in taht fashion at all
The photos above, from the 1940s, show a young Monroe as an actual sort of girl next door. Her physical features were no doubt the same as they were in her earliest movies, but they weren't being emphasized. Soon after these photographs they would be, and in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, they were on display.
Playboy,. as noted, arrived in 1953. The 1950s gave us a host of actress that were Monroe knockoffs, some with even more exaggerated features. By the early 1960s a wave of Italian and other European actresses hit, all of whom were very topheavy, although they weren't portrayed as dumb. Playboy and its followers kept on keeping on and if anything exaggerated things more. Camuglia comes from that era.
Indeed, it was so notable, it made up one of the comedic lines in 1963's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:
J. Algernon Hawthorne: I must say, if I had the grievous misfortune to be a citizen of this benighted country, I should be the most hesitant at offering any criticism whatever of any other.J. Russell Finch: Wait a minute, are you knocking this country? Are you saying something against America?J. Algernon Hawthorne: Against it? I should be positively astounded to hear of anything that could be said FOR it. Why, the whole bloody place is the most unspeakable matriarchy in the whole history of civilization! Look at yourself, and the way your wife and her strumpet of a mother push you through the hoop! As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated. They're like slaves! They die like flies from coronary thrombosis, while their women sit under hairdryers, eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother's Day! And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms. In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I'll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight.
In a lot of ways, we're still in it. It's what's given us plastic surgery and a host of other horrors.
So, overall, what I'm saying is that actual physical appearance didn't change that much, but rather the publicized standards did, to women's detriment.
So what about the gym?
When Camuglia appeared in Playboy in the early 1960s "working out" wasn't a term. Indeed, gymnasiums were around, but their atmosphere wasn't quite what it is today. In a lot of places the gym was the YMCA. Indeed, in this locality, it was for years, before, some time in the 1970s, private gyms began to appear.
Early gyms really had all the features of moder nones, they were just less used and sort of used by a clas sof urban people who was unusually into physical fitness, save for weight lifters, who are a different class entirely.
Having said all of that, women have been involved in athletics, if not working out per se, for decades.
Australian female Olympic swimmers, 1932. These women look pretty darned fit.
Girls basketball team, 1907. Playing basketball while dressed like this must have been a huge pain.
Indeed, nobody was "working out", really, until the 1960s. There wasn't much of a need to.
That doesn't mean that people weren't physically active, however. Women were involved in Olympic sports right from the onset, for example. And as late as the 1970s, at least, an incredible number of women engaged in some sports, such as tennis and golf. My mother, who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, was an avid golfer at one time, and a real fan of tennis. She also constantly rode a bicycle, and she swam nearly daily up until her final decline. Yes, she's an unusual example, but not that unusual.
Her mother, I'd note, was also a tennis player.
There's sports, of course, but there's physical work. And everyone engaged in a lot more physical activity by necessity.
Which catches us back up, sort of, to the 1950s. As we've discussed here before, domestic machinery really came in after World War Two, and with that, a decline in physical activity. This meant more women went into office work.
The 1950s also brought the country the "cheap food" policy, and we still live in that era, and that's where things really begin to change. This was noted the other day on Twitter in a post by O.W. Root
O.W. Root@NecktieSalvageCurrently there are two extremes that didn't really exist en masse before.1 - Extreme obesity2 - Extreme gym cultureMaybe one day those extremes will fade and a more traditional historic norm will replace them.
That pretty much nails it in a way, other than to say lots of people are neither part of a gym culture or obese.
A lot of people are taller, however. That's been well noted. It's a nutritional thing, but here's one area where people, including women, have a different morphology than they once typically did. Contrary to what people tend to think, however, its flatted out since the late 1970s after having really gotten ramped up, around the globe, in the 1890s.
Now, here's one more thing that's changed. Women in particular used to at one time very much "age" once they hit their 40s.
Contrary to what people think, people don't "live longer" than they once did. Rather, premature mortality has dropped way off. But people did "age" more quickly. If you look at photographs of married couples the appearance of women over 40 is often shocking in comparison to now. Now, for various reasons, women in their 40s are not regarded as old or even middle aged, but often if you go back to mid century they'll have a much older appearance. I"ve seen photographs of women in their 40s whom you would easily guess were in their 60s.
That's probably all due to the stress of life and hard work.
So, all in all, I don't think the evidence supports the assertion there's been much of a change at all. I do think that an emphasis on a certain look, or a series of appearances, has changed over time, but more recently its broadened back out, which is a good thing.
Iceland girl delivering milk.
Mexican women in festive dress
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