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.

In Fife at that time, if you referred to someone as "fit" it meant that they exercised, etc.

But only on Top of the Pops

Not all of that is just one person's experience though. Some things are verifiable.

"there were many very thin people about" can be proven with stats.
"Rosemary Conley (author of the ‘hip and thigh diet’ and slimming club club founder)" - we can prove that she existed. Whether she was influential on everyone is more a matter of opinion.

"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."
My experience was the opposite of this, but I was a teenager in the 90s rather than the 70s. Older female relatives were more interested in force feeding others than telling them to diet.

The article someone posted above literally tells you the etymology and usage of fit in the UK. It says by the 70s it was being used in inner cities before becoming more widespread by 80s and 90s. So stop trying to catch op out!

11 year olds having their eyebrows done, ugh indeed. Mine are still little, I didn't realise this happened so young. Sad times.

@godmum56 Women were not even allowed to buy a drink in a pub, a man had to buy it for them in the 70s.

Not sure which county you lived in, but I bought drinks all the time. Never had a problem. You had to be 18 but that was the law and norm.

Thank the lord

They were dreadful

My eyebrows were first plucked by one of my sisters when I was 12

They met in the middle and came very low so I was quite grateful

This was in the sixties

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Schoolfriend's sister was a Pan's Person. A few years ago, I saw some archive of her dancing, alone, on YouTube and was surprised how sensuous it was. Enough to make Mary Whitehouse flutter, definitely.

that's what I said. It was @HumanRightsAreHumanRights who i quoted, who said different.

I was working in London, and we were allowed in pubs and we didn't need a man to buy the drinks

Where did you live?

Even rurally we could buy our own drinks

Sorry, quoted wrong post.

Should have been to @godmum56

Same, I was born in 1970, my mum in 1946, and my nan (her mum) in 1909. Not once has my mum ever mentioned weight to me, and nor did my nan - who died in 1997- ever speak of it. Not everyone's experience of the past tallies with the present day mythology.

Interesting because in the 90s you definitely didn't have to be 18 in most pubs!

If you’re struggling with the content, I’d advise speaking with your PhD supervisor. I’m not sure MN is the appropriate outlet. Do you have ethical permission to post about and share the diary content on public forums, even in anonymised form? (edited to correct “either” / “with”).

In addition, if you are collecting responses on MN for your own research analysis, for ethical reasons please also be upfront about that.

It was a fairly common experience. Something doesnt have to be completely universal for it not to be the case. There are always outliers and excpetions to anything, thats life.

Its fair to say the majority of the population now are overweight/obese. That doesnt mean everyone is.
Its fair to say the majority of people dont smoke, but that doesnt mean smokers dont exist.

Some things are more common than others. Diet culture and the pusuit of slimness has always been with us in one form or another. Its not particularly modern.

I'm sorry this happened to you, though it's a very interesting and detailed point.

I sometimes see white working people in the historically poor area where I live with facial features that I think of as 'genetically malnourished' - they might not themselves have been malnourished (though the prevalence of UPFs means it's possible) but have inherited the physical features of generations who were.

I'm not struggling with anything.

Of course I do, yes. I'm just here for discussion.

Yes, but I should probably mention that my DM DID diet a lot because she yo-yoed. She just didn't enforce that on me.

My DGM was beyond that kind of vanity by the time I was born and she was around 60. She may have been different in her youth.

Then the whole thing of food = love meant that my relatives still now offer huge amounts of unhealthy food that will actually do us harm to show...love. I think the whole cake pushing is just as bad as the 'diet culture' people are talking about.

I have my Grandma's diaries from the 60s-90s and they read pretty similarly. More shocking is the cost of food noted in there 🤣

This girl talked about going for a shampoo and blow dry (I'm assuming no cut involved) which cost £1.60.

Some really weird ideas here. I was a teen in the seventies and I definitely bought my own drinks in pubs. People are talking as if it was the Victorian times. I’m pretty sure we never said somebody was ‘fit’ though. That expression just wasn’t commonly used.

Oh plucking is understandable (as owner of a monobrow myself). I thought the poster meant the thick microblading trend thing that is going on (not sure what it is called). I might have misunderstood.