What's the Standard? When you look in the mirror, do you measure your reflection against the ideal on medical charts or from magazines? In today's society, the female form we want looking back at us is in constant flux, not along the evolutionary scale, but along a scale, according to many experts, that is programmed by turning points in technology, medicine, politics and the mass media. Patricia Foster writes in Minding the Body, "To reveal our fears about the body-aging, eroticism, infertility, beauty-has been difficult for women in our culture because these very fears have often been used against us to deny our rights to visibility."
Thin Cycle		The first "beauty backlash" of this century, according to Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," began in the nineteen twenties with the securing of the vote, women's emancipation and the shift in clothing comfort. "Everywhere there was this thin ideal, this flapper ideal," says Wolf, who notes that smoking became popular during this time by women trying to control their weight to achieve the "very slim, boyish figure that was suddenly in." Thus, a new species of woman was born--the tomboy. The flapper was only one of the many forms held up as the "ideal" woman during this century. Since the rail-thin model Twiggy's debut in 1965, Wolf says, there have really only been "tweaks" in the ideal. Foster comments on how the forces of change intertwine with the status of women's bodies, "I wonder now if the cultural acceptance/rejection of the female body will always be a cyclical drama, women advancing economically only to be restricted psychologically by the cult of physical perfection." Take a look back at some of the shapes, sizes and people that defined society's ever-changing "ideal" woman.