The ideal female body type has also changed dramatically

The ideal female body type has also changed dramatically over the centuries, from the plumpness of the seventeenth-century model (voluptuous women are called Rubenesque for a reason) to the hourglass figure



 enforced by nineteenth-century corsets to the 1920s flapper silhouette to today’s painfully thin but full-breasted models. For decades the Miss America pageant sought to define an ideal female body — white, of course. All these ideal types of women’s bodies are rooted in a specific time and place.

Women’s bodies are also something on which laws are inscribed. Sumptuary laws in Puritan times dictated what clothing women could wear (not too ostentatious, please), and slave codes defined the actual items worn by enslaved women. Laws determined how much flesh women could show in public, as Annette Kellerman found out when she stepped onto a beach in 1907 in a one-piece bathing suit and was promptly arrested. Other laws regulated whether women could inherit property, practice birth control, serve on juries, be drafted, and a host of other activities.


One of the longest-standing prohibitions was against physical activity. Organized sports were seen as especially problematic for women, whose supposedly delicate bodies (especially their tender reproductive systems) were seen as unable to withstand the rigors of a game of baseball or basketball, particularly while menstruating. Never mind the hard physical labor women did in their homes and on their farms for most of recorded history. This raises the question whether the prohibitions against organized sports for women were truly designed to protect them. Were they? Or were they meant to ensure that women believed they were the weaker sex, or that a woman could not be an athlete and be feminine, or were they really intended to keep organized sports for men only?

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