Constructing the Healthy, Attractive Child

• In Event: Idealized Bodies

Abstract

This paper examines how possessing an attractive smile has become a necessary part of what it means to be a “healthy” child in the United States. Attractiveness and health have been conflated in the normalization of childhood orthodontics in the United States. The paper is part of a larger study of how orthodontics became an expected part of growing up in the United States, and the consequences of the normalization of orthodontics for the lived experience of race and class. I interviewed a racially and class diverse sample of individuals aged 18 to 72 about their experiences living in a society in which teeth straightening is prevalent. These interviews document the taken-for-granted experience of orthodontics for middle class youth and their parents, and the feelings, which range from defiance to shame, of people with irregular teeth who had difficulty paying to have them straightened. Using archival sources at the National Library of Medicine and Smithsonian Institutions, journalism written for parents and teens, and beauty advice books written for children and teenagers and every issue from 1945 – 1970 of American Girl, the monthly magazine of the Girl Scouts, I investigated the development of orthodontics from the perspective of its first practitioners and identified when it became normative for children and teenagers to have their teeth straightened. Post—World War II prosperity produced, by the 1970s, the first generation of American children for whom braces in the middle school years had become a part of growing up. The politics of appearance can never be only about class in a society structured by racial inequality. Race shifts the meaning and experience of obtaining a perfect smile. A set of braces can be an expected part of a middle-class white childhood, or a technique of assimilation for communities reaching for upward mobility and inclusion.

Author

• Maxine Leeds Craig