In the midst of these exhilarating gains, other social, cultural, and political forces were conspiring to cast the middle years in an unflattering light. The brief renaissance of the middle-aged would soon draw to a close.
5
The Middle-Aged Body
Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of Physical Culture magazine, in the 1920s
My skin’s tattooed with hours and days and decades, head to foot.
—Mary Meriam, “The Romance of Middle Age”
The building up of one’s physical assets should be recognized as an imperative duty.
—Bernarr Macfadden, Vitality Supreme (1915)
George Beard and William Osler championed the mental vigor of younger men compared with those in middle age. Most scientists, health advocates, and members of the public in the second half of the nineteenth century were much more concerned with physical vitality. Their preoccupation was spurred by leaps in knowledge about how the body functioned. Science rather than religion had become the primary frame through which people interpreted their world. Attention shifted from the afterlife to this life, from spiritual transcendence to the material wonders of the here and now. Great minds were unlocking the mysteries of electricity, the evolution of species, the elements of the periodic table, and the movement of atoms. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch’s formulation of the germ theory of disease in the 1880s cranked up an already vigorous fixation on hygiene.
Taking responsibility for the care of one’s body substituted for the unchallenged control that God and king once exercised over their subjects. Health reformers spoke of “physical capital”—a finite store of vital energy—that had to be wisely cared for and invested. In 1899, the bodybuilder and publishing entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden put out the first issue of his magazine Physical Culture, the era’s term for physical health and fitness. Macfadden (who reputedly changed his first name from Bernard to Bernarr because “it sounded like a lion’s roar”) built a huge empire that included exercise equipment, sanitariums, restaurants, and several books and periodicals. In 1903, he founded the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, whose members became famous for taking a dip in the freezing Atlantic in wintertime. During one of Physical Culture’s frequent contests, Macfadden discovered Charles Atlas, who later made a name for himself with a mail-order bodybuilding course that offered hope to ninety-seven-pound weaklings. Macfadden instructed his many followers that success depended on “developing the physical organism to the highest possible standard, and maintaining it there.” Physical fitness could work hand in hand with Taylorism. He was convinced that his regimen of exercise, hydrotherapy, and “scientific feeding,” a combination of diet and fasting, would enable American workers to become more efficient. Even Randolph Bourne, whose body was deformed by disease, glorified youth as much for its physical vigor as its untainted principle. It was the “showery springtime of life,” Bourne wrote in Youth and Life, distinguished by a “great, rich rush and flood of energy.”
Physical culture was pursued with almost religious devotion. Worried that portrayals of Jesus Christ had lacked sufficient manliness, Christians presented a form of “Muscular Christianity” that was practiced in the growing number of YMCAs. Theodore Roosevelt, convinced that his own childhood maladies were cured by vigorous outdoor activity, extolled the virtues of the hearty physical life. Physical education and team sports were instituted at the girls’ schools and women’s colleges that were established at the end of the nineteenth century. The use of the word “hygiene” in English-language books, which began a steady rise after 1850, shot up exponentially around 1900. That year the British biologist William Bateson coined the word “genetics” to describe the physical material of heredity, the start of a phenomenal series of breakthroughs. Two years later, the British physiologist Ernest Starling discovered secretin, subsequently giving this and similar substances a name: hormones.
Science had transformed the body, which once represented a basket of cosmic forces and moral standards, into a collection of tissues and organs that signaled health or decay, normality or deviance. John Henry Kellogg wrote that he founded his Battle Creek sanitarium, visited by thousands of middle-class and wealthy patrons each year, in order to employ every aspect of modern medical science to determine “deviations from the normal standard of health.” (Macfadden also ran a sanitarium in Battle Creek from 1907 to 1909, later renaming it the Macfadden Healthatorium and relocating it to Chicago.) A healthy body was seen as an emblem of a rational, individualized self. Many scientists at the time held that the state of the body determined mental health, just as earlier reformers assumed it reflected moral fitness. In women, the ovaries were believed to control personality. Troublesome changes in the female disposition were frequently treated by removing the offending organs. Cesare Lombroso, the Italian doctor who founded the field of criminology in the 1880s, linked the shape and size of the face and head to mental capacity and cultural differences. In his schema, some people were “born criminals”; they were throwbacks from an earlier stage of Darwinian evolution. Lombroso, whose views were particularly influential in the United States among Progressive intellectuals and politicians, warned that physical “degeneration” presaged the social and cultural decline of Western civilization. Biology was destiny. Such views gained wider currency in the early 1900s after more of the mechanics of genetics were uncovered.
But defining age strictly in terms of biology carries an inherent bias toward the young. Inevitably, a purely physical inventory of middle age—stiffer muscles, dimmer eyesight, slower reflexes—will reveal deficiencies in comparison with youth so that the advancing years parallel a regression from health to deterioration. In this context, the very process of aging was seen as abnormal. Some scientists hypothesized that aging was not a natural condition at all but a disease caused by a virus. Elie Metchnikoff, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908 for his work in immunology, theorized the cause was toxic bacteria that was produced in the bowel and spread through the body. Other doctors attributed aging to a failing of the thyroid gland.
The emphasis on physicality trapped middle age in a destructive cycle. A focus on biology reinforced a negative view of middle age, which in turn drove attention to the body’s decay.
The Sensual Life
A keen awareness of the body was further heightened by the spread of sensual comforts in everyday life. In this wealthier, democratic age, the middle class as well as blue bloods could enjoy indoor plumbing, silken fabrics, plumped-up comforters, and woven rugs. As America was transformed from a producer-oriented society that encouraged thrift and savings to an affluent consumer-centered society, more and more citizens were able to appreciate physical amenities. The flush of spending and display caused the “conspicuous consumption” that the economist Thorstein Veblen famously skewered. If the nineteenth century was like a sturdy wooden chair, the beginning of the twentieth was a plush red velvet cushion.
In the early 1900s, businesses catered to this newfound appreciation of comfort, physical hygiene, and looks by offering hundreds of new cosmetics and toiletries to ensure everything from a luminous complexion to a spic-and-span bowel. “All, with hardly an exception, pay far more attention to health and body-keeping than ever before and many evolve an almost fetishistic faith in the efficacy of some item of food or regimen to which they ascribe peculiar virtue,” G. Stanley Hall remarked.
The flood of advertising and movies also put the physicality of the body on display as never before in magazines, Sunday newspapers, and theaters. America had turned into what the poet and author Vachel Lindsay, famous in his day for traveling throughout the country to give dramatic recitations, called “a hieroglyphic civilization.” The flood of shared images helped mold expectations about how people should look.
Movies further modified accustomed ways of seeing. Images that streamed out of Hollywood in the first decade of the twentieth century imprinted ideals of youthful beauty on enthusiastic audiences. D. W. Griffith invented the
close-up, zooming in on a lineless and wide-eyed face. By the early teens, millions of Americans were taking in a picture show every week. Certainly the tilt toward youth is part of the industry’s founding story. Those in front of and behind the camera in the early days were barely past adolescence themselves. America’s sweetheart, Mary Pickford, appeared in films at 16, as did Clara Bow, the original “It Girl,” who ended up a has-been by 28. Rudolph Valentino was dead by age 31.
Pioneering filmmakers did not initially assume that actors would become obsessive objects of fans’ desires; before 1910, most movies hid the names of players and creators. As modern advertising evolved in the twenties, studios used it to create and market movie stars. The large and lucrative industry that developed around fan magazines further forged the connection between beauty and youth. Actors gained a second profession as celebrities, creating models of glamour that were reinforced at every Saturday matinee. Concocting backgrounds for its budding stars, the studios encouraged readers to identify with their tales of ugly ducklings turned into swans. Advertisers offered readers the opportunity to buy products that promised to effect a similar transformation. “Is Your Skin Younger or Older Than You Are?” asked a 1923 ad in Pictorial Review for Pond’s Cold Cream and Pond’s Vanishing Cream. “Actresses tax their skin to the utmost. Yet they are noted for their beautiful complexions because they have learned to give their skin regularly the two things it needs to keep it in the fresh, supple condition that wards off age.” Four young starlets were enlisted to offer their endorsements.
Films reinforced expectations about what styles, behaviors, and gestures were appropriate for a teenager or a middle-aged woman. In darkened movie houses, silent pictures communicated a screen character’s personality and role through clothing and movements.
In such a visual culture, it was possible to create widely disseminated templates of beauty and style that people from San Francisco to Atlanta could view and imitate. Gibson Girl drawings, created by Charles Dana Gibson at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, may have provided the first common national image of feminine beauty in America. Unlike the more voluptuous female forms prevalent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Gibson Girls had tiny, cinched waists and youthful features. In 1930, McClelland Barclay’s mass-produced illustrations of young and athletic girls were adopted as an emblem of the Fisher Company brand, which produced automobile hulls. The Fisher Body Girl, modeled on the artist’s 19-year-old bride, presented another idealized, youthful image to which women could aspire.
Greater numbers of advertisements carried the message that physical beauty, even more than chronology, was the definitive barometer of aging. “When it came to age, how old you look is more important than how old you actually are,” a 1923 ad for Boncilla face powder declared. “If you are fifty and your face is clean and fresh, and your facial contour firm and youthful—you are young. If you are twenty—and your skin is dull and lifeless, and the outline of your face is drooping—you are old.”
Camera Vision
Awareness of one’s own appearance grew with the invention of photography. Americans were so unaccustomed to regularly seeing themselves that when portrait photographs first became popular in the 1840s, subjects sometimes rejected the finished product, refusing to believe the image on paper was theirs. On occasion, customers even picked up the wrong photograph, mistaking someone else’s face for their own. Affordable portraits, like inexpensive mirrors before them, encouraged a new level of narcissism about one’s face and physique. Marketing campaigns and, later, movies fueled the indulgence. Individuals viewed themselves through a “double gaze,” imagining how they appeared in the eyes of someone else.
This heightened degree of self-consciousness, of watching your own self, is something the newspaper columnist Heywood C. Broun observed of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920: “He sees himself constantly not as a human being, but as a man in a novel or in a play. Every move is a picture and there is a camera man behind each tree.”
As photographs and film images permeated everyday life, Americans developed what the fashion historian Anne Hollander calls “camera vision”—the way we see images that are captured by a camera. As she explains in Seeing Through Clothes, by the 1920s chic was no longer defined by graphic artists and portrait painters whose painstaking pen and brushwork was meant to be appreciated through prolonged examination but by the instant image captured through the camera’s lens. This split-second glance in turn influenced standards of fashion and beauty.
At the turn of the century, for example, middle-aged women embodied stylishness. They dressed to present an S shape: hair piled high under a hat, and a bustle resting on the rear to emphasize the “mature bust and hips.” Buxom actresses like Lillian Russell and Lillie Langtry offered models of beauty with thicker waists and seasoned features. Young ladies adorned with layers of silk, muslin, and crinoline hid the true shape of their bodies and mimicked the style of the middle-aged. “Until this century, and until the movies, the ideal well-dressed woman had been the Lady, a cultivated personage whose mature style and charms had been carefully developed over time, with the support of the social position and income of her father and her husband,” Hollander writes. Compared with these formidable middle-aged ladies, young girls had “only a raw awkward charm and no style at all and their lives no scope. They lacked training, experience and fully developed bodies; elegance was not at all suitable to them.”
Mrs. Woodrow explained the allure of a mature woman to The Cosmopolitan’s readers: “The woman of fifty, who is beautiful, is the woman who lives in the world’s life, in its finer issues and ideals, its hopes and dreams. . . . In a word, she has not been afraid to live.” Harper’s Bazar noted in 1912 that middle-aged women “express a degree of elegance, dignity and charm in her mode of dressing which a younger person striving after bizarre and smart effects cannot hope to attain.” Then, the supermodel body would have looked a lot more like Helen Mirren’s than Naomi Campbell’s.
By 1925, the 20-year-old Clara Bow represented the new look, sexy and self-sufficient, rather than mature and experienced. Abstract graphic design incorporating simplified shapes mirrored the preference for sleek body outlines popularized in films. “Since that time,” Hollander notes, “women have had to be slender.”
Fashion photographers of the 1920s, like Edward Steichen at Condé Nast, helped transform the slenderized figure into a glamorous ideal. Unlike turn-of-the-century reform-minded photographers who captured grainy, pockmarked reality, Steichen created a flawless paragon of feminine beauty. For the first time, young girls rather than middle-aged women embodied elegance. A 1927 ad for Ivory Soap in Photoplay claimed “youth ‘de-bunked’ clothes and living.” Beneath an illustration of two women, one in a long gown with a bustle, the other in a short slim dress, was the text: “Youth demanded simple clothes instead of these fussy, elaborate styles of the 1900s. Clothes more expressive of youth’s own slim natural grace. . . . Youth has taken the artificiality out of American taste.”
In Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep, the middle-aged Dexter Manford notices the altered female form as he flirts with an acquaintance his age. Wharton herself was more like the “rich armful” that Manford remembered: “how splendid he had thought plump rosy women in his youth, before money and fashion imposed their artificial standards.” By comparison, the young and wanton Lita, with whom he is nonetheless fascinated to the point of ruin, is a “stripped skeleton.”
Rejuvenation Therapies
The heady wave of breakthroughs, from the internal combustion engine to the telegraph and airplane, reinforced Progressives’ belief that all human behavior and social ills could be managed with help from technology and scientific rationality. Amazing creations that their grandparents would have considered fanciful had materialized—machines that lifted occupants to the heavens; devices that permitted conversations across the country as if across a parlor; potions that could cure previously fatal feve
rs. Science was magical. Thomas Edison was described as a “wizard” who could transform night into day.
In this atmosphere, the idea that science could restore the body to its youthful form did not seem so far-fetched. Revolutionary-era physicians like the founding father Benjamin Rush believed that certain organs and functions underwent “renovation.” One of the early experimenters in rejuvenation was the 72-year-old French physician Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard, who in 1889 reported that he had injected himself with a mixture of testicular blood and semen extracts from dogs and guinea pigs, and had regained the energy of youth. His work was predicated on the widely held assumption that the weakening effects of old age were the result of a depletion of sperm.
Ernest Starling’s discovery of human hormones in 1902 spurred a flood of experimentation into these wondrous chemical messengers that moved through the bloodstream and regulated growth, sexual development, physical shape, and more. Hormones looked like they might hold the key to stopping or reversing aging. “There seemed to be a more general agreement that a man is as old, not as his heart and arteries as was once thought, but as his endocrine glands,” G. Stanley Hall concluded after surveying the leading medical authorities.
Fevered talk of “an elixir of youth” was further fueled in 1912 by the French surgeon Alexis Carrel, who announced he managed to keep a sliver of chicken-heart tissue alive in a culture. Headlines promised that the immortal chicken heart would defeat aging, among other miracles, but it was no more successful than the various kinds of rejuvenation treatments that followed it.
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