Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France the idea of "physical culture" emerged, promising health and beauty but also seeking to promote women's fertility in a period of declining population. Going beyond the simple argument that women's bodily standards and practices were altered by such cultural disciplines as education, medicine, journalism, and advertising, Mary Lynn Stewart argues that these disciplines needed to change their own messages in their attempts to persuade women. As Stewart demonstrates, internal contradictions in the experts' advice, especially concerning issues of sexuality and reproduction, failed to convince women to follow all of their counsel—particularly the most persistent advice, which was to have more children.

In For Health and Beauty, Stewart reviews the new scientific and medical attention to women's bodies during the Third Republic and traces the growing emphasis on women's private hygiene as the basis for public hygiene. She then examines compulsory education in hygiene and gymnastics, the flourishing genre of women's medical and sexual self-help literature, and the commercialization of health, beauty, and fitness products—all contributing to new scientific and commercial representations of the female body. In both the scientific and popular works, including women's autobiographical writings, bodily ideals changed from rounded, plump figures to straighter, slimmer contours, and from relatively immobile to relatively active bodies.

Mary Lynn Stewart is a professor and chair of women's studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s–1930s and coauthor of Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, both published by Johns Hopkins.

Mary Lynn Stewart's profile page

"This carefully researched work challenges historians to a different kind of dialogue on comparative studies... It is stimulating for those interested in comparative representations of gender differences and political pressures on women's self understanding."

History of Education Quarterly

"This seminal work will inspire considerable discussion, and belongs in every advanced library collection."

"[A] wide-ranging history of physical culture at the turn of the century... Stewart's conclusions are thought-provoking and the range of her research impressive."

Medical History

"Like good wine, this book exemplifies how ten years of slower maturation of research bring a more subtle and multi-layered final result... an invaluable springboard for multi-disciplinary investigation in French, social and women's history."

History: Reviews of Books

"Mary Lynn Stewart has produced an informative work based on her examination of a wide range of scientific and popular sources from the period. She succeeds in bringing to light the attitudes conveyed to French women about their bodies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

French Review

"In sum, For Health and Beauty provides a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the shifting discourses and practices of bourgeois French women's embodiment during five momentous decades of transformations in gender norms and expectations."

"An extremely thorough and perceptive analysis of a vast corpus of largely disregarded material."

French History

"A thoughtful and highly readable study... No other historian has so successfully integrated the discourse on women's bodies, framed by an idealized concept of the bourgeois woman, with the physical reality of the working-class woman's experience."

American Historical Review