1910s: "Progressive Era"
Herbert Wescott Fisher's Making Life Worth While
Making Life Worth While: A Book on Health and More is a self-help guidebook published in 1910, which was written in order to teach people (mainly the white middle class) on how they can lead a more fulfilling life. The author, Herbert Wescott Fisher, focuses on why people become unhappy with their lives in the first place. Whether this reason is superficial, such as the desire for material objects, or whether it is a more emotional reason, such as the desire for affection and attention from others, Fisher analyzes why we sometimes feel that our lives are incomplete. Fiasher discovers that one of the main ways to correct this issue is self-care and learning about how to keep our bodies healthy. For example, Fisher emphasizes what is a proper diet and what foods are the best for us to eat on a daily basis. His rationale behind this has to do with his belief that if you keep your body healthy, it will intrinsically make you happier and make your life more worthwhile. Believing a focused effort towards maintaining an ideal feminine physical apperance and health, Fisher claims that women will finally garner greater self esteem. Lastly, Fisher gives a detailed daily regime (as shown in the photo on the left) which he states will allow the follower of the regime to maintain a worthwhile life style, naturally increasing their happiness.This section brings together much of what Fisher was advising his reader about in his book and puts it into an easy to read chart for the reader to be able to easily follow.
Bernarr Macfadden and Marion Malcolm’s Health - Beauty - Sexuality, from Girlhood to Womanhood is a self help book that informs women how to be healthy and how to be the woman that a man wants. Throughout the guide, the authors demonize prudeness and emphasize that female sexuality is positive. Bernarr Mcfadden believes that sexuality is one of the major keys to being as healthy as one can be, and was a large figure within the Progressive Era. Today, he is credited as the father of physical culture and wrote many books, newspapers, and magazines on the topic of physical well-being. When discussing the health of the face, he explains how certain meats make people less healthy and should be avoided, saying that certain meats make the face blotchy. He also believes that city life leads to unhealthiness, causing unnecessary stress and leading to a stronger menstrual “flow” for a woman. Mcfadden also believed that beauty and health went hand-in-hand and emphasizes how a healthy woman looks more appealing to a man than and unhealthy woman. Although Mcfadden believed in the sexual independence of a woman throughout the book, it seems he still believed that a woman needed a man to be happy and live a fulfilling life. Despite a few contradicting points, Macfadden's guide is an effective source to give insight on the Progressive Era. Along with his other books, Mcfadden brings up prudeness and shows the progression of views on sexuality, yet still brings the male point of view into it. This source is one that is not written by a medical professional and should not be read as a work of science, but rather as one of opinion that shows the patriarchy and lack of information on the female body within the time period.
Conclusion
Both guides focus on the need to lead a healthy, fulfilling life, discussing the protocol for how owmen should dress, act and uphold hygiene that will inevitable lead to a more fullfilling and happier life. Although Fisher does not speak about sexuality as Mcfadden and Malcolm do, Fisher's message is extremely similar in meaning. Unlike Mcfadden and Malcolm, Fisher delves into the philosophy behind his reasoning, and explains that overall health and hygiene is directly linked to a person's happiness, implying that unattractive people are simply just not happy. Both books also address women and advise them that appearing more attractive to a man would help them lead a more fulfilling life. This implies the happiness of a woman is determined by the opinion of men. Although the Progressive Era was a time of transitional opinions of sex and beauty, there were several aspects of these new ideologies that still mirrored the conservative thinking of the previous era, and although women were making strides, their lives were still dominated by their male counterparts.