Reframing Women's Weight: Does Thin Equal Healthy?

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Abstract
Since the description of the calorie and the manufacture of household scales in the 1800s, Americans have been obsessed with body weight (Schwartz, 1986). At first the emphasis was on diets to help the thin gain weight to improve their health, but by the 1920s the focus had shifted, and dieting to lose weight became fashionable. Thinness had been associated with tuberculosis, which was a major cause of death in the 1800s (Bennett & Gurin, 1982); by the 1920s physicians had made considerable progress in curing TB and other infectious diseases (Rothblum, 1992a). Oscar Rogers, a physician working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, reviewed a sample of the company's records ...

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