Lifting the Bell Jar

Abstract

During the 1950s, most women didn’t pay much attention to being healthy. Being thin, model-like, with cinched waists and long legs, was the ideal, and to attain that thinness, women chose diet rather than exercise. Because of her height of five feet, nine inches, Plath usually had no worries about gaining too much weight. But in McLean, like other patients on insulin treatment, she became heavy.