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.

Its a shame that the focus was on being slim as competition and getting male attention

Its not a shame that people should talk about being a healthy weight now for health reasons

The two shouldnt be conflated but they often are

My nan and aunts would tell me stories of when they were in a cheaper version of the Tiller girls on the London stages and how the focus was not to eat and not to put on weight, eating only apples and cabbage water to stay light.

Nothing really has changed in that respect with fad diets etc.

We're not much healthier now emotionally or physically so Im not sure we can look back with smugness to those women then and pretend we're vastly different. It just has a different presentation, off the top of my head one of the examples of that is the UPF obsession, which although well meaning, is just another status of being, often used as social judgement on others. Conversely of course our shit food environment has resulted in most of us being either overweight or obese.

I was born in 1971 and right up until I asked them to stop in the mid-90s both my parents (divorced) would routinely comment on my weight and talk about how fat people were awful. I was slim and healthy back then but I'd get looked up and down and even pinched almost as soon as I went to visit either of them.

I feel I should say that back when the Bridget Jones' Diary book came out, it was quite obvious that she was a comic character, and her obsession with weight was pointless as she was clearly quite slim. She had other "comic" traits like her obsession with men, her alcohol consumption, and her lack of tact. The book wasn't some sort of social comment, it was taking the piss out of a certain kind of young woman who did badly paid jobs in London and was basically looking for a wealthy Prince Charming. (I'm sure most of us know a woman like this or have been one!) Yes the fashion was to be very thin and weight culture was bloody awful but the book was taking the piss, I promise!

Are you new here or something!!

You'll also have to explain whether your OH is controlling and whether you earn more than the average or not, whether you wash your towels once a week (discustin) and other important details in order for people to answer the question.

It wasn't, though, in my life... none of my family or friends had the slightest interest in weight. I think the diary was written by someone unusually obsessive about it. There's much more focus on it nowadays, probably because generally we eat too much.

There's always one isn't there? 🙄

I agree with the vanity sizing too.

I had a size 12 dress in the late 1980s, and it went into the attic in the mid 1990s. I was probably 9 st 3 ish then, and had a 25-26" waist. (Late 1980s.)

Fast forward the early 2010s, my 5 ft 7" DD was slim and had lost her little bit of 'puppy fat' from her early teens, and was dress shopping. She fit into many size 8s. A size 10 was a bit big. A size 12 was huge. (She was a size 12 in her early teens.)

This one day, I pulled out my 'size 12' dress from the late 1980s, (2012 I think it was,) and DD tried it on. She could only just zip it up. It was a bit tight. It was a little bit tighter than it had been on me. (She had a 26-27" waist, still has...)

Proving (as we all know on here) that vanity sizing is a thing. My 'size 12' dress today would be a size 8 now.

I also agree with the posters saying that some women in peoples extended families were obsessed with their daughters/grandaughter being thin. My mum wasn't, but my nan, and my great aunt (born 1910s) were bloody awful. Don't you dare be over 8 stone 10 or have a waist of more than 24", or you are FAT, and no man will want you. All the LOLz!

I think 'fit' was used to mean attractive in the early 20th century but slowly died out in the UK, before being imported back by West Indian/Windrush emigration.

So your diarist was either behind or ahead of the curve.

I suppose you might see it as moral. In that it seems immoral that 11.4 billion of the NHS budget is spent annually on conditions stemming from obesity. I see it as purely financial in the current climate.

People were different then as they are now.
I was 17 in 1975. Very, very few people were fat, and those that were weren't on the scale of obesity you see now. My friends and I were stick thin.
We never ate "snacks", I still don't which is why I weigh the same at 67 as I did at 27 but have never dieted. We drank a lot though.

I don't remember any of my friends being weight conscious. We were interested in fashion and boys for sure and I feel we had more freedom than teenagers now because there weren't such rigid societal rules about how you should look.

One big change for the better is the awareness of the benefits of exercise. We never exercised, not ever. We dodged it in school PE and after school it just wasn't a thing. I don't remember anyone I knew participating in sport, running or going to a gym. Although I did bike 5 miles to work until my mid 20s.
My DC and their partners are all fitter and healthier, albeit carrying a touch more weight, than any of my peers were at that age. They also barely drink alcohol. They will do better long term health wise because of it.

Do you mean the early 21st century? Fit is quite a modern word meaning attractive, rather than physically fit.

Agree with others of course there is vanity sizing. I think my measurements are about a size 16 but I wear sizes 8-10. Ridiculous. I cant buy any genuinely vintage clothes unfortunately.

FAR fewer! I first visited the US in 1976 and TBH was astonished at the number of grossly fat people. In particular I remember a very fat boy of maybe 12 in one of the ‘24 hour breakfast’ places, with a massive plate of food, including about a 6 inch pile of pancakes with a lump of butter the size of a tennis ball on top.

And everywhere you went, it seemed that there were people eating - often bucket sized containers of fries, etc. Fast junk food was available just about everywhere you looked.

I was newly pregnant at the time, suffering from minor morning sickness, and found it so hard to get a SMALL meal anywhere. Everything came on a plate about a yard wide with all sorts of extras added.

I am not saying that nobody had those experiences. People still do. What i do object to is the assumption of "that is what it was like for everybody"

And your annual salary (unless you are leeching off your husband's 6 figure one, in which case for goodness' sake get an escape fund as he's either gay or having an affair) which RG university you/your very healthy and good looking children went to, and where, 'rurally,' you live.

1975 I was 14. I cant really remember us girls stressing about our weight. Back then there was very little UPFs, a lot fewer cars, we walked to most places. Obesity was very rare, ^ see above ^^
We did spend much of our free time drooling over the fit lads at iur school though, so that hasnt changed 😆

What’s really jumping out at me here is how many women were only maintaining such a low weight by essentially not eating. Cottage cheese, celery, a piece of a cheddar and an apple. It’s wasn’t healthy or normal for these women to be that weight, they were starving themselves.

It explains more about how when I eat a ‘normal’ amount I put on weight. The only time I’ve been a size 10 was as a teenager and I stopped eating. Like for days on end. In my 20s I stopped eating much again - was eating a slice of toast or two a day - and got down to about 12 stone….

Clearly, different people have different genes and a healthy weight for one is a ‘starving themselves’ weight for another

Actually, if you look at photos of Pan's People, they look like healthy, fit women. They were fit and strong because they were dancers. None of them were excessively thin.

There were hardly any fat people in the 80s either - it would be something that really made you stand out. We didn't have a lot of junk food outlets. Fish and chips, Wimpy...It feels like another world when I think about how things were then

this

Yep. As I said, during the times my waist was 25"-26" (in the 1980s,) I was a size 12.

Now, a 25"-26" waist is a size 8.

And I doubt the word 'fit' was used.

Never heard it back then

Sounds exactly like today

Yes I think it was probably quite a thing for my mums family because of the dancer background of all the aunts and because naturally they are/were quite short and tubby so would have had to starve themselves to be the shape and weight that was expected of them

My grandads family I dont think were quite like this, naturally solid but not focused on weight loss but my paternal aunt did used to comment on other fat people, when I was sat there in front of her and obviously very big!! Its just how it was, being fat has never been viewed as ok

I think we also dont understand how it is abroad either, people dont 'approve' of being overweight in other countries and arent shy about making that known.

Even Twiggy wasn't as emaciated-looking as the models in the 80s/90s

No, 20th century. I think this is where I first heard this.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27795905

In the early 80s, the big gossip in my all girls school was that the head of 6th form had managed to get a mortgage on a 1 bedroomed flat ON HER OWN.
She was the first woman we'd ever heard of who was able to do that.

It was only in the mid 70s that women were not asked for a male guarantor to get a mortgage, a credit card or a loan, which was only phased out because of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.
Before that, it was extremely rare for a woman to be able to buy property or get a loan from a bank without a male to sign for it.
My own mother only had a secondary card for my dads credit card as she couldn't get one on her own when they married.
When she left school and got a job, her father had to go in to open her a bank account.

Women were not even allowed to buy a drink in a pub, a man had to buy it for them in the 70s.
Marital rape wasn't illegal either (until 1991).

It was a very different world in a lot of ways, but being insecure about looks isn't one of them.

It was Pan's People