Throughout history and around the globe, women have routinely squeezed, bound, crushed, tweezed, poisoned, pricked, and stretched various portions of their anatomy, sometimes with permanent ramifications, sometimes with excruciating agony, all in the name of beauty. Why was beauty so important? There's no perfect answer, but I explain five theories:

1. Darwinian Evolution


2. To Catch a Man (economically)


3. Outer Beauty Meant Inner Beauty


4. Peer Pressure from Other Women


5. For Herself Alone

All of those elements were present well before the 20th century, and while economics did shift dramatically for many women in the past 100 years, did anything else really change?

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