Every era has its ideal woman: In the Stone Age, she was compact and strong, a short, squat figure with a large bust and an equally healthy stomach. Today, society's standard of physical perfection often seems to be a long-legged blond with a tiny waist -- 38-18-28, to be exact.
In the $3 million interactive exhibit that opened yesterday at the Maryland Science Center, women young and old tell the story of their struggle to make their bodies "perfect."
They've deformed their rib cages with corsets and ruined their feet in high heels.
Teen-age girls describe dinner as a stick of gum and a Diet Coke.
These graphic examples in the exhibit trace women's health over history, exploring such themes as body image, women's risks for diseases, and how illnesses are detected and treated.
"The Changing Face of Women's Health," which will tour nationally, is the first major exhibit to address this broad and increasingly important area.
"This will keep women's health on the top of the nation's agenda," the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. David Satcher, said yesterday.
He noted the mounting evidence that women and minorities are not treated as aggressively as white men, yet he also reminded the crowd of health experts how far women's health has come.
A hundred years ago, the average life span for American women was only 48, and as recently as 1985, the Physicians Health Study of 22,000 people didn't include a single woman, according to the exhibit.
But new laws require women to be included in clinical trials, and experts said yesterday that the model of women's health is expanding, from focusing only on reproductive issues to the entire life span.
The exhibit also opens amid stepped-up activity at the federal level for women's health, including more gender-oriented research.
Studies have already revealed differences between males and females in how drugs metabolize, blood circulates and the brain functions.
"One-size-fits-all health care is no longer going to work," declared Dr. Wanda Kaye Jones, one of the key people behind the new exhibit and a top official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In Baltimore and across the country, museum staffers are reaching out to schools and women's groups, hoping the exhibit will spark girls and women to question their doctors and take better care of themselves.
At the very least, it will get their attention.
Visitors will find their female peers, current and past, speaking to them through videotapes, pictures or the written word.
They delve into the fear of cancer, the universal passages of menarche and menopause, and why women are more at risk for sexually transmitted diseases than men.
Inside the body
Guests can feel the lumps in actual breast models that doctors and nurses use to train, and see how atherosclerosis can change the blood vessels in the heart into a glob.
They can pull a corset tight, or literally weigh the pros and cons of hormone replacement therapy using a mechanical scale. (About a third of prescriptions written for hormone-replacement therapy are never filled.)
"The more you know, the less fearful you become," said Lu Damianos, 63, a Pittsburgh woman whose breast cancer was treated by lumpectomy and radiation. She is one of many women who talk frankly in a video so guests can draw from others' experiences.
Visitors also have the chance to give their own input, writing their feelings about eating and their fears of menopause. They can also read the comments of previous guests.
Organizers hope to dispel some of the many misconceptions women have.
A 1997 survey by the American Heart Association found that 61 percent of women perceived cancer as their greatest risk, compared with just 7 percent for heart disease. But the greatest killer of women is heart disease: One in two women will die from it.
Still, because of factors including a lack of awareness among patients and doctors, about 35 percent of women's heart attacks go unnoticed and unreported.
Osteoporosis is another example. It is often viewed as an older woman's disease, and more than half of all women 50 and older will suffer an osteoporosis-related fracture.
Yet bones stop growing between the ages of 20 and 30, so doctors say women must eat calcium-rich food when they are teens. Skipping meals, bingeing and purging, smoking and drinking alcohol all weaken bones.
But the exhibit also highlights some successes in women's health, such as the Pap test. In the 50 years since it was introduced, cervical cancer deaths have dropped from 35,000 a year to fewer than 5,000 today.
And the once-dismissed premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, is now emerging as a real part of many women's cycles, possibly involving hormonal changes in brain chemistry.
Women become physicians
Part of the change in medicine has come from within, as more women have joined the ranks of doctors. In 1969, for instance, only 9 percent of medical students were women, compared with 41 percent today, according to the exhibit. A quarter of practicing physicians are women.
Three years in the making, the project is the work of the National Health Sciences Consortium, a collaborative entity of nine major-market science centers. Funded through a combination of public and private sources, it will be at the Maryland Science Center -- which led the work on the exhibit -- through August.
Then it travels to Atlanta; New York; Portland, Ore.; Chicago and other sites through August 2003.
One artist whose work is traveling with the project hopes to get women to stop seeing themselves as ugly. T. J. Dixon, a sculptor from San Diego, has done a series of bronze nude sculptures of ordinary women at all stages of life, from teen-age years to pregnancy and older womanhood.
In "Wendy at 45," a heavy woman sits with her hands on her knees. In "Beverly at 51," one breast is gone, from a mastectomy.
"Not one of these women was happy with her body," Dixon said. "You can allow yourself to look at a woman with a mastectomy. I want to widen our vision of what's beautiful."
But Dixon is fighting a culture soaked with images of the "perfect woman."
In 1997, the average American woman measures 37-29-40, while the Barbie doll measures the equivalent of 38-18-28.
The probability that an American woman would hit these numbers? Less than one in 100,000, according to the exhibit. In fact, about one-third of women are overweight now, a 25 percent increase since the 1970s. Experts blame it on too much eating and not enough exercise.
At the show, women -- and men -- can use poker chips to vote on what they would most like to change about themselves. Then they can open a door to see the running tally. So far, the winning pick for both genders was face/hair changes, rather than intelligence, shyness, or that simple category, "I like the way I am."
Pub Date: 3/03/99