Download or read book Reducing Bodies written by Elizabeth M. Matelski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America explores the ways in which women in the years following World War II refashioned their bodies—through reducing diets, exercise, and plastic surgery—and asks what insights these changing beauty standards can offer into gender dynamics in postwar America. Drawing on novel and untapped sources, including insurance industry records, this engaging study considers questions of gender, health, and race and provides historical context for the emergence of fat studies and contemporary conversations of the "obesity epidemic."