“Don’t Be a ‘Garbage Gertie’”: Dieting, Food, and Femininity in the Australian Women’s Weekly, 1950s–60s

In 1959 and 1964, the Australian Women’s Weekly (the Weekly), Australia’s most popular women’s magazine, offered its readers the ‘chance to make money while...dieting’ in two separate dieting contests. Readers were encouraged to share their weight loss tips, tricks, meal plans and success stories for the chance to win hundreds of pounds in prize money. Weight-loss messages shared by the contestants in these competitions varied. While some advised their fellow slimmers to exercise self-restraint and simply stop being a ‘Garbage Gertie’, others suggested radical transformations to the way that people ate.

Drawing on the Weekly’s 1959 and 1964 diet contests, as well as other prescriptive dieting features printed in the magazine during these decades, this paper explores the role that the Weekly played in disseminating and reinforcing notions of ‘ideal weight’ and the ‘ideal body’ through its discourse on food and weight loss. While feminist scholars have considered the way that the cultural conception of fatness influenced the mainstream diet, by and large they have not interrogated what women on weight loss diets ate—or purported to eat—and what this can tell us about wider food culture. This paper reveals the messages that the Weekly was sending its readers about what food was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to eat, the way in which foods should be prepared and eaten, and the effect that food would have upon the readers’ bodies. In doing so, it demonstrates that for many women, food consumption caused significant anxiety and dieting provided a means of exerting control over not only their bodies, but also their gendered identities.