Stop me, won't you, if you've heard this one before
From the Atlantic:
Is it possible that the stout woman, poor dear, has at last become stylish? May she at last be frankly fat, emancipated from the frantic remodelings at the hands of corsetière and couturière? The burden of obesity is not in the carrying of its pounds, but in being forced to treat the obvious as if it were surreptitious. What dizzy elation for the fat woman to realize that henceforth she is suffered to be not only frank but fashionable!
Specifically, from The Atlantic, February 1919, as you may have guessed from the word choice and syntax. Well, maybe not the precise date, but the style is pretty damned archaic, to my eyes, at least.
That reprint -- oddly, they weren't posting stories to their site back then -- was linked in The War on Fat, part of their Flashbacks series, worth examining if just to realize how many of the serious issues of the day are, in fact, the serious issues of yesteryear.
Which isn't to say rehashing 'em is pointless -- there usually wasn't consensus back in the day, and even if there was, some things do change. . . but what often seems to be missing is a realization that this is rehashing something, and the same old arguments are trotted out, even the ones that were effectively shot down in the previous. . .
Ok, this is getting perilously close to that discussion of politics/current events I'm trying to avoid.