7 - Bodies

Summary

The experience of sex is closely linked to people's physical bodies. As historians have fully demonstrated, both scientific and popular understandings of the physical body have greatly varied in the course of history, including during the last two centuries. This chapter therefore presents testimony concerning what our informants thought about their own bodies and about other people's bodies. The chapter concludes by examining some of the ways in which their understandings of the body informed sexual practices in marriage.

The oral history evidence provides an alternative perspective to that of other historians' researches on changing experiences and attitudes towards the body during the twentieth century. There is a long-standing history of the increasing interest of the state in the healthy bodies of its citizens, particularly of infants, children, mothers and young men of fighting age in the century of mass conscript armies. Recent historiography has argued that this was also accompanied by a marked rise from the interwar decades onwards of a sexualised body consciousness. A leading historian of changing attitudes towards the body during the twentieth century, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, sees the history of popular attitudes towards the body as fairly directly aligned with trends of rising consumerism and with the associated history of clothing fashions.

From the 1920s onwards a majority of young women have spent substantial amounts of money, energy and time in order to manipulate their bodies and change their looks to copy the ideal beauty of a particular era. The emphasis on perfect bodies and particularly on self-improvement through the purchase of consumer goods is a central feature of twentieth-century consumer culture.[…]