Introductory Note
You can find complete publication information for the books mentioned here in the earlier article entitled Annotated Bibliography: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/brea...
Our nation seems to be engaged in a festival of breasts. Our fascination with them is insatiable, and the images are everywhere.
(Latteier, p. 8)
Although women have always had breasts, only in America over the last half of the twentieth century have breasts become a consuming passion of the culture, invoked and visible everywhere. This twentieth-century fascination with the breast has led to a media image of the ideal breast-or perhaps the media's push to create the image has led to society's fixation. But whichever came first, the cultural fixation and the ideal image are undeniable. They shape the way women evaluate themselves and complicate the adolescent girl's passage into womanhood.
It hasn't always been this way, of course. In earlier civilizations, and even today in many non-Western cultures, women's breasts are accepted as natural, normal, and therefore unremarkable. But in the U.S., the cult of the breast began to develop during the period of prosperity after World War II:
...breasts were the particular preoccupation of Americans in the years after World War II, when voluptuous stars, such as Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell, and Marilyn Monroe, were popular box-office attractions. The mammary fixation of the 1950s extended beyond movie stars and shaped the experience of adolescents of both genders. In that era, boys seemed to prefer girls who were "busty," and American girls began to worry about breast size as well as about weight.
(Brumberg, p. 108)
Writer Carolyn Latteier describes her experience of coming of age during this era like this:
I grew up in the late 1950's, the era of "mammary madness." Breasts were practically the definition of femininity during those years. They had to, above all, be big. Brassieres of that era were highly engineered structures, with two conical cups stitched in precise spirals and carefully labeled from small to large: A, B, C, and D. The goal was to get as deep into the alphabet as possible. Size was everything.
(Latteier, p. 4)
This fascination with breasts-and particularly breast size-has deeply influenced all females who have grown up during the last half century. As Ayalah and Weinstock discovered while compiling their ground-breaking study in the late 1970s:
In one interview after another, as we observed the numerous and varied instances of causality which linked a woman's breasts to her personality or lifestyle, we were amazed at how basic and profoundly fundamental the experience of having breasts actually was in women's lives.
