"Honey, you aren't chubby. Your friends are just really too thin. You are perfectly fine the way you are... Oh! I forgot, I bought you some new clothes, have some Chubbettes..."
Being a teenage girl in the 50s must have been awful. I've also seen a lot of ads from that era for girls that are too skinny and need to gain weight. The acceptable "pretty" range must've been really small.
I talked to my mom about this because one day in my teenagehood she made an offhand comment about how in her youth everyone had tiny waists and big boobs & hips, but now we were built more straight (all of us are pretty thin) as though somehow evolution had changed us in one generation. When pressed, she explained "it was foam rubber and girdles". She meant the style had changed, not the bodies.
Yep, very small window of acceptable. Skinny girls built out, thicker girls nipped in.
You should read some of the fucking creepy reviews of Brooke Shields' 1978 movie Pretty Baby. Tons of reviewers talking about how she oozes sex appeal. She was 11 when filming the movie.
i remember when a teacher talking to us, when we were kids, about how she had to wear chubbette as a kid and none of us knew what she was talking about, thats a trip
It's also when Norman Bourlag was most active with GMO research making certain unhealthy and fattening foods, like grains, abundant and cheap in the decades after the Green Revolution.