Standardizing Slimness: How Body Weight Quantified Beauty in the Netherlands, 1870–1940

Abstract

This chapter investigates the history of one of the most powerful quantitative beauty standards: weight. The chapter argues that weight is neither a natural nor a neutral standard for the beauty ideals of slimness and fatness. It is shown first how, in late nineteenth-century Netherlands, weight had not yet become a standard of beauty but was rather a bodily curiosity, measured at fairgrounds. The chapter then analyses Dutch newspaper advertisements for slimming remedies to show that, by the 1930s, weight was strongly established as a standard of beauty, scales having ceased to be a fairground attraction. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the consequences of this new standard of beauty, which complicated its character by partially separating it from the visual.