Posted under American history & childhood & class & the body
Yesterday, Michelle Obama announced the “Let’s Move” initiative to end obesity in children. And, as I mentioned in my previous post, I just finished reading Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009), which is a fascinating exploration of ideas about cleanliness as well as the technologies and somatic experiences of cleanliness (or its absence) and how they change over time from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. I haven’t had the time to do a lot of reading on “Let’s Move,” but I’m already struck by how rhetoric about obesity today tracks with the same concerns 200 years ago about civilizing American bodies through cleanliness, and children’s bodies in particular. It’s really uncanny.
Brown makes the point that nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.
If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign. Here are a few selections from Brown’s book with the relevant substitutions from page 327: Continue Reading »




I watched
For those of you who will be doing battle at an airport, train, or bus station near you for your holiday travels, pick up a copy of The Atlantic (December 2009) and read
Well, friends: we’re in the midst of a butt-chapping deep freeze, thanks to an Alberta Clipper that just won’t quit. It’s -15 degrees Fahrenheit here in Potterville, and won’t get above freezing until sometime this weekend. Those of you in the East might be enjoying a snow day today, so here are a few tidbits to warm you up and get your engines running this morning:
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