‘Are you Norma, Typical Woman?” With that headline, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an Ohio newspaper, launched a contest in 1945 to discover the woman whose body matched an alabaster statue, “Norma”, sculpted by Abram Belskie and American obstetrician Robert L Dickinson. Their “Norma” and “Normman” statues were based on measurements taken from 15,000 young women and men, almost exclusively white and ablebodied. Nearly 4,000 women submitted their height, weight, bust, hip, waist, thigh, calf and foot sizes to the newspaper’s competition. Not one of them matched Norma’s contours exactly.
As Sarah Chaney notes in her captivating book, Norma was a fiction derived from a biased sample. In fact, much of what we believe is “normal” about human bodies, health and behaviour is based on data from a sub-section of the…