Coincidences

This is one of the books I'm reading. So far, what I've learned is that the first time dieting became widespread in America was in the 1920's, after a french designer came up with the new slender flapper silhouette to replace the voluptuous Victorian hourglass figure. Then I saw this from The-F-Word:

My graduate thesis focuses on the evolution of beauty and aesthetic standards for women as they evolve in tandem with the women’s rights movement. As I shared in a snippet of a recent paper, weight control and standards act as a form of social control, filling women’s time and attention, keeping them busy and hence distracted from activities that risk disrupting an established gender order. “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty,” writes Naomi Wolf. It is “an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

What else happened around the 1920's? Oh yeah, women gained the right to vote.