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.

I struggled to get into one of my mum's old dresses from the 70s. It was a 12, and I was a size 8. This was in the late 90s. So I do think vanity sizing is real.

Also back in the 90s you'd never ever see a size 4 and rarely a six. The smallest size was 8 and I think it's equivalent to six or four now.

I was 15 in 1975. It seems to me, that not much has changed in terms of a lot of girls' thoughts & ambitions.

Except that when I was 15, and 165cm I weighed about 50 kilos - I was on the skinny side of normal. People were generally much thinner then. We didn't have all the take away as normal, all the "convenience" foods as normal, all the eating out at restaurants as normal.

There just wasn't as much cash about for this kind of eating, and it was far more expensive (in relation to incomes) than now.

I think @NorthernGirl1975 if I were your supervisor, I'd sympathise with you about the deep socialisation of femininity, but advise you that you may need to develop a little more historical objectivity & contextual knowledge about the period - but then that's what PhD training is for.

Why on earth is this such a 'shocker?' Many teenagers/young women feel like this now, and felt like this then.

I was 9 st 4 at 5 ft 4 when I was 18 or so, (1980s) and had a 26 inch waist. I went on a 'crash-diet' to try and lose 10 pounds, because I felt and (thought) I looked fat. I ate 3 apples in one week. (This is in MY diary from then.) 3 fecking apples! I put in my diary some days that I had been GOOD today, because I had had nothing to eat.

Seems horrific now, but I did this, and so did others. (Some probably do now.) I had a 24 inch waist a couple of months later at 19 now, (after losing nearly a stone and dropping to 8 stone 7.) About 3 months after I had dropped to 8 stone 7, a bloke I had just started to see squeezed my waist on the dance floor and said 'you can pinch more than an inch haha.' (Of fat he meant!)

I had finished my diet 3 months earlier, but this threw me right back into crash dieting again. I dropped to 7 stone 12, and had a 22 inch waist. I looked like a fucking corpse, grey in the face, and worn out, and my mum nearly cried saying, FGS Zov, EAT! I thought I looked great, (I saw how awful I looked when I looked back at photos from then a few years later...) I also exercised feverishly, and ran and cycled and danced and burned off LOADS of calories. Also walked almost everywhere.

People were obsessed with being thin in the 1980s, and the 1970s were no different. There were diet aids all over the place. Aydslim, Slimfast, weightwatchers, aerobics, F-plan, Cambridge diet, Mayo Clinic Diet etc etc etc.... Wanting to be thin is not new. Even before then women strived to be thin/slim. My aunt (born in the 1930s) said she drank a whole bottle of castor oil to try to lose weight when she was about 17 - in the 1950s!

(It's not being 7 stone 12 that made me look so awful, it was the crash dieting, not eating hardly anything, and losing weight fast that did it. I'm not saying anyone at that weight will look like shite!)

I was also extremely flattered when I had men chatting me up and I got wolf whistled. (I know I know!) It started getting on my nerves by the time I was in my early-mid 20s, especially when I got hit on, said no, and got abused by the man in question!

But yeah tl;dr, I don't think this 1975 diary is shocking @NorthernGirl1975 Most women have always strived to be attractive, to be thin, and to look good (often to attract men!)

Really sad to read that but unfort I understand only too well. I felt I had to do everything to win her approval.

So I do think vanity sizing is real.

Yesss! I was thinking this as I pulled on my Primark long sleeved cotton Tshirt this morning. I was a 10 as a teenager, but 50 years later, I'm a large 12, with weight trained arms (with biceps!) and a S for small is loose on me.

I just don't think we ate as much back in the 70s. Certainly not in our family when I was a teen. There just wasn't the endless array of delicious meal choices. I was thinking the other day about how portion sizes have grown. Was I hungry all the time back then, or did it just seem normal? I wouldn't count the family dinners we had back then as a proper meal now, which explains why I am no longer a size 6 😉

Oh yes I remember ‘pinch an inch’ - it was the ad for Special K, implication being if you could pinch an inch of flesh you needed diet foods, pronto.

It was about being thin or you'll never get married

That's exactly it.

You had to be thin or (horror) you wouldn't attract a man.

The end.

yup and "diet Pepsi can help. one calorie, one calorie, diet Pepsi can help"

Born in 1960 my mother was obsessed about weight and we are a very skinny family. I weighed below 8 stone until my mid 20s and I’m 5’7”.
Never had puddings or sweet things to eat. I thought she didn’t like them until she started eating them in her 80s/90s
I think it’s only the current dementia that has meant she eats whatever she wants. But has not lost that looking down on overweight people.
Accompanying her to a&e and her commenting in a very loud voice on the size of some of the nurses sooo embarassing. She does the same now with the carers. Suddenly she shrieks ‘look at the size of her bottom!’

Surely it was much better for people to be thin rather than the ridiculous 'body positive'?I

More than half of adults now are overweight or obese, with all the ill health that will follow from that.

I was 19 in 1975, 7stone 10 and a size 6, measured 32,20,32. I was at a top university. None of my friends were fatter than that, and definitely wouldn't have wanted to be. We certainly weren't focussed on attracting the male gaze (although I don't think men were that interested in fatter girls) The point is we were healthy, walked or cycled everywhere and are little junk food. Clothes were made to flatter that body size and shape because it was the norm. I find it so depressing seeing the number of obese young women wandering around in clothes which draw attention to their size and seeming not to care.

Normalizing obesity is not 'being kind'.

" ignoring that Bridget was quite a bit shorter. "

Her height was never mentioned.

In our household we weren't brought up to worry about weight at all. It kept itself down naturally by virtue of walking everywhere and eating quite small portions by modern standards. This was down to household economics rather than imposed restrictions. Most people couldn't afford unlimited access to snacks and soft drinks. At 21 and 5'3" I was just over 7 stone, and imagined this would always be the case. I never thought about refusing a plate of chips or a cake for the sake of my figure.
Some of the stories about older people remind me of my late MIL, who was obsessed with maintaining a low body weight, and when dementia took away her inhibitions around social norms she would openly scold other patients and residents for being so bold as to actually eat their dinner.

This could be my DM. She’s exactly the same.

This is very true as I was well over a size 16 most of the time and was beyond miserable about the clothes I could wear as Evans was thr only choice

It absolutely is! I found (in an old suitcase) an 80's Laura Ashely dress. Size 18. I'm a 12/14 now, nearer to a 12. Dress ONLY just did up. Buttons straining.

I am a similar age to you. My dad frequently commented on my thunder thighs, and I ‘knew’ as a fact I was fat from a very young age.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was at my brother’s house. My aunt from Canada had given him a load of photos from our youth (we have barely any as our parents weren’t big photo-takers) taken during their occasional summer visits - well, I could’ve cried for that young girl, because the photos show a totally standard body shape really all the way until puberty. Even at 16 I wasn’t ‘fat’ - I now know I’m a natural pear shape. But because of all the fat stuff, I hated my legs.

I still remember the glee in my mother's face when she weighed and measured me after I'd woken up from five days with suspected meningitis aged 15.

Never mind that I'd been so ill and not actually died, the best thing about it was apparently that my hip measurement was 31 and a quarter inches.

Not surprisingly, really - as far as she was concerned, I'd always been a behemoth of a child and despite all her efforts in buying every single diet magazine and leaving them on my chair for at least 3 years, my weight had gone up to a shocking eight stone five before I'd got sick (5'6").

That weekend, I took the dog out for a walk early Sunday morning - I wore a pair of size 10 jeans she'd already taken in by about 3 inches all over before I'd got ill and she was going to take the waist and legs in again later that day, plus a size 10 sweatshirt because I felt really cold. Everything was far too big, but I wasn't feeling up to walking into town and going shopping for new clothes less than 18 hours after regaining consciousness.

A random teenage girl saw me on our way to the park and informed me that I was so fat, I must be a size 20 and, on the way back a random elderly woman muttered about how I should be ashamed of myself in getting so fat. The following afternoon, I walked home with two friends, one of whom had bought a packet of fruit polos to share around. A BT engineer digging something up said 'You shouldn't eat those, girls, you'll get fat' and as we ignored him and walked past, he changed fat to 'fatter'.

In the same year group, the girl who was generally regarded as the one with the ideal figure said she wasn't that slim as she was nearly 6 stone (and 5'7", by the way) but her Mum was because she weighed 5 stone 4lb. And none of us thought that was anything but lucky.

We haven't 'lost sight of what healthy looks like'. We never knew what it looked like in the first place.

Plenty of food in 1975, what are you talking about?!

Good for you. Aren't you wonderful. Congratulations on winning the 'Being slim and wonderful' prize . You worked hard for it and deserve it

Some of us were just disgusting fat lazy people who didn't deserve to be alive, let alone fine clothes to fit us

I was warned about getting fat when I approached size 10 at 5’6
in 1975 aged 14

I was put on a diet of celery and cottage cheese. I remember girls, including me, making sure their hip bones were prominent.

’Double figures’ were considered huge in weight standards.

I had a size 12 friend who was called ‘Lurch’ or ‘fat cow’ by local lads.

We were working class - food was not abundant and mum had two jobs : one in a biscuit factory and Saturdays in Marks.

Every day she had a small piece of cheddar and an apple until dinner.

My mum was persecuted by my dad about her weight. ‘Fairy elephant’ or ‘look at the size of her dripping with fat,’ are a small sample of the insults she endured while working her guts out fuelled by that bit of cheddar and apple.

My family still eye each other up for fatness. I have a cousin who tells me she’s told her daughter in law over and over that she’s a ‘friggin’ docker’ and is angry that she doesn’t lose weight. (They don’t speak)
I had an aunt who lived on ‘Limits’ and sometimes gave me an orange flavoured Limit biscuit for dinner when I stayed with her.

I could write a book with these stories…

I have no problem in admitting I would hate to be overweight now that I am the age of one of my favourite Beatles song.

It’s easier to stay mobile and fit and despite surviving an extremely tough life including two different types of cancer I can cycle and go to body pump classes - I love this.

I have seen my twenty plus stone brother whose nick name for me has always been ‘fat head’, ‘fat face’ and ‘fat ugly cow’ suffer physically and mentally with his weight.

He has life threatening heart problems and can only walk with a stick and is in constant pain.

Oh I loved Steve Harley.
I've still got, and enjoy listening to, a vinyl lp of his and Cockney rebel.
Very sadly died last year.

You don't have the permission of the woman who actually wrote the diary, just her sister?
And you are just using it for the research purposes but to start a thread on Mumsnet about it?

There was plenty of food, but it wasn't the done thing to be snacking all the time. I remember that changing in the 80s. People used to say not to eat between meals as it will ruin your appetite. Then Mars came up with 'helps you eat, rest and play' and it became much more common to buy these things. Later on you even had dietitians/nutritionists telling people to snack!

I have permission from both. Are you saying everyone will know who she is? I don't think so. This will be referenced in a thesis eventually that anyone can access. Stop policing worrying.