1975 diary shocker

[NorthernGirl1975]

As part of my PhD I'm looking at primary sources. I'm currently reading a diary from 50 years ago. The writer is obsessed with how she looks, what she eats and weighs and whether or not she's pretty.

There are lots of references to getting male attention. She goes to a summer gala with her friend and talks about the ice cream man being fit.

Then says she and the friend were chatted up on the bus and "Wolf whistled by two guys so that's not bad to say I'm a stone overweight". Earlier she's stated she weighs eight stone three. Says she's joining weight watchers as no guy would want to be seen around with a fat ugly girlfriend. Some guy who looks like Steve Harley keeps staring at her.

She went to buy a dress she liked but there was only one and it was a size 14 and too big. That's a 10 today isn't it? Christ knows what size she wanted to be. She's written measurements down as "35-25-35" and is obsessed with looking like one of Pam's People.

This is so depressing.

35 25 35 would have been a Size 12 in 1975. Also, did she use the word 'fit' to describe a boy? We used to say 'he is a bit of alright'.

They got Renée Z to a point where she looked normal, then used it for clickbait articles (well it was Heat Magazine and the usual tabloids back then) about how skinny you had to be in Hollywood, and how that compared to British women with their acres of chub 🙄 Side by side photos of how it changed her face etc. RZ then had a shit ton of plastic surgery a few years later and I often wondered if that was related.

Maybe!

You've unlocked a memory of me learning it from Ali G

Women were not even allowed to buy a drink in a pub, a man had to buy it for them in the 70s.
This just isn't true. I was buying my own drinks in pubs from 1974 onwards ( underage but that wasn't enforced much). I can only think this might have been a rule in a controlling relationship or maybe a working men's club.

I got a mortgage on my own in 1982, it wasn't that unusual and I wasn't some high flying Londoner, this was a northern town and I was a civil servant.

True. Being thin does not automatically = gaunt and unhealthy. Some women are just naturally small/thin. My oldest cousin (6 years older than me, and 5 ft 1") was never ever more than 8 stone. Always fluctuated between 7 st 8 and 7 st 11, depending on her time of the month. She seemed to eat normally, and I never saw her on a diet. She did walk a lot and went swimming regularly which probably helped, but yeah, she was healthy. And she always looked nice. (Still does. the bitch! 😆)

Only went up to 9 stone when she was full term pregnant. She has narrow hips, small breasts, and a tiny waist, and she is small-boned. She's like a little pocket-sized doll. And she birthed 6 children, between 17 and 27. It's just in her genes. Her mum was similar, but a little bigger (5 ft 3 and a whopping 8 and a half to 9 stone (LOL #kidding!) Her nan was like her, teeny tiny pocket rocket. 5 ft 0, and about 7 and a half stone for most of her life. But yeah, healthy. And she ate normally AFAIK.

It was years before it dawned on me that the reason that I was heavier than my schoolmates was that I was taller than them.

One time, I was coerced into loaning another girl my swimsuit because she'd forgotten hers and her class had their swimming lesson a couple of periods before ours.

It fitted this shorter girl fine. I wish that the penny had dropped then.

Yes, I didn't develop good bones or teeth. I didn't grow at all well. I have a half brother whose father was more gracile than my father and yet he developed far better in every way due to the fact that he was raised on the periphery of our family and on far better and more plentiful food. Meat especially.

I was also raised in a dirty home full of cigarette smoke and as a result of this and the resultant mouth breathing (just to get breath) I had a lot of chest infections and my upper jaw/maxilla didn't grow because I wasn't using my nasal cavities at all. My face is sunken as a result so I look nothing like I was designed genetically to look. My teeth have suffered as a result of this mouth breathing and also as a result of my poor diet. I have spent a fortune as an adult to try and make the best of it but if you were to look at me you would likely think, 'genetically weak'.

Did you think mental health is a new invention?

Where you under the assumption that anorexia or body dismorphia just 'magically' appeared out of nowhere in 1990.

All times had their trends too. The most absolutely downright 'offensive' thing you could say to my nana was that she was 'skinny', the woman was in her 80s, fit as a fiddle (could out pace any 20 year old) and a stick of a woman (size 6 would hang off her so she bulked and layered) who always looked fantastic but don't ever dare say that to her. I her era (wonder if its to do with being born during depression times and coming of age during rationing etc...) being 'skinny' was deeply shameful apparently.

"Women were not even allowed to buy a drink in a pub, a man had to buy it for them in the 70s.
This just isn't true. I was buying my own drinks in pubs from 1974 onwards ( underage but that wasn't enforced much). I can only think this might have been a rule in a controlling relationship or maybe a working men's club."

Could it be that women were supposed to sit in the snug and only men went up to the bar? Maybe more of a tradition in some places. I don't remember those times, but seen plenty of old clips of women sitting in one part of the pub.

It was the ice cream guy she was talking about. It was just that statement so no real context.

That all sounds very familiar to me! I was 8 stone when I was a teenager and constantly adding up calories and on diets. I remember having a 25 inch waist in my early twenties and thinking that was fat. It was a different world.

Women were buying their own drinks on the old episodes of Corrie. No one is going to tell Ena Sharples she cant get her own drink.

And if you had a stroke or heart attack you were mostly a gonner. Now there are drugs, emergency treatments, therapies and ongoing long term monitoring which have drastically improved survival rates. As evidenced by the increase in life expectancy. However it all costs money and adds to the workload.

Size ten then would probably be a size 6 now.

Depressingly, for some women I know in their 50s, still nothing has changed, and their whole sense of self is tied up in the looks and dress size.

Im 57 and very few of my peers are concerned with being thin. Concerned about healthy weight, yes, but not of being aesthetically thin. We’re far too wrapped up in the fear of osteoporosis and losing our marbles. 🙄

My mother is still obsessed with weight and judges other women by their body shape. I have her letters that she sent her mother in her early twenties, most of the conversation is about how much she weighs, how much her friends weigh and 'reducing'.

Brilliant😂😂

She was a widow though so no husband to buy her drinks.

I was also 16 in 1975. I can honestly say that me and my friends never talked about our weight and didn't't give it a thought. We were all fairly slim anyway, as we walked everywhere mainly, and there wasn't the snacking and junk food culture there is today.
Also, just to say, that most women worked and always have done.Who do you think worked in the factories and shops and launderettes and as cleaners etc. Schools were mainly staffed with women teachers, admin workers, dinner ladies and cleaners. Many customer services outlets were also staffed by women, and other professions such as social workers were also full of woman workers. The whole damn country was staffed by mainly women during the 2nd world war- working on the land producing food and factories producing ammunitions and anything else required.
It's a Mumsnet myth that women didn't work outside the home. Some very affluent middle class women didn't, but the rest of the nation's women did.

I used to buy drinks in pubs in the 70's Shock horror I even used to go into some pubs ON MY OWN. Yes women could be asked for a male guarantor but that was the financial institution and not the law.

In 1977 in Fife, women were only allowed into the lounge bar ISTR. ETA Yes, they could buy their own drink there.

In 1990s Aberdeen there were pubs that had no women's toilets!

Pretty sure I remember it being used.

I absolutely agree. But quite a few of the posts on here are extrapolating their experience to a more general view and suggesting that "that is what it was like" instead of "this is what it was like for me" here's an example.
I remember the 70’s. That doesn’t surprise me.
Diet culture was everywhere and there were many very thin people about, especially older women who had been young during the war. Rosemary Conley (author of the ‘hip and thigh diet’ and slimming club club founder) was a prime example.
Even if you were slim you’d be constantly admonished by Mums, Aunts and grandmothers not to put weight on and admonished again if it was suspected you were not ‘watching your weight’ as well as you might.
Misogyny was also rife and being cat called and wolf whistled on the street was expected. If it didn’t happen my older sister used to think it was because they were unattractive and / or fat. When they got married their husbands called them fat all the time as a way to control and abuse even though they were extremely slim, which they achieved and maintained through black coffee and chain smoking.
I mourn the loss of many things from my youth, but not all that.

At least women and girls weren't having cosmetic procedures such as lip fillers and botox and pornography wasn't as readily available and influential as it is now. Girls weren't pressured to look like the women in porn magazines.

Women have always been judged on their looks in ways that men will never be. Just read Jane Austen to see that 'pretty privilege' has always existed and that men didn't admire women for their wit and intellect. There is much more awareness now of how damaging this is to women and girls, but the ubiquity of porn is still a massive problem.