Norma, Normann and the Normal
In 1944 two statues made of white alabaster were revealed at the Cleveland Health Museum. Norma and Normman (Appendix 1) were created to reflect the “normal American”; they were based on the measurements of thousands of american men and women. In a time where Americans were looking for ways to find what made them unique, Norma and Normman became more than representations of an average, they became an aspiration. As objects, these statues were embedded with all the ideas and anxieties of the culture that created them; ideas about sexuality, gender, race and class which shaped American identity during the 1940’s and are still relevant today. Nowadays, these statues lie in the Warren Anatomical Museum in Harvard University’s Centre for the history of Medicine which is one of the last surviving anatomy and pathology museum collections in the United States. Now as museum objects they can be studied and questioned critically as part of the complex construction of concepts that have become invisible to us such as “average” and “normal”.
Norma and Normman were designed by Abram Belskie, a British sculptor, and Robert Latou Dickinson an obstetrician and gynecologist who was famous for his studies of reproductive anatomy. The colour, material and presentation of the statues remind of classical greek and roman sculptures; this is no coincidence as Urla and Swedlund explain “Body ideals in twentieth-century North America are influenced and shaped by images from classical or ‘high’ art (...)”  (Urla and Swedlund, 2000). The statue's measurements were based on a dataset of 15,000 women and men between the ages of 20- 25 years old; this dataset included data from many University students of the time. Even though this data claimed to represent the “normal” and “average” American, University students at the time represented a sector of the population which was mostly white, heterosexual and wealthy. The dataset chosen excluded people of colour, poor people and other religious, sexual and gender minorities; this not only excluded them from the data set but it also excluded them from the construction of what became the idea of the “normal” American. 
Anthropometric data has been collected since the eighteen and nineteen centuries; this data was gathered by scientists who were interested in the understanding of moral, racial, or gender characteristics through the study of the body, specifically the white male body (Urla and Swedlund, 2000). During the period between the two World Wars American doctors became concerned with the physical fitness of the American people, especially concerning the characteristics that made Americans unique. Urla and Swedlund affirm that “Standards for the ‘average’ American body, male or female, have always been imbricated in histories of nationalism and race purity.”  (Urla and Swedlund, 2000). Anthropometric data was just one of many tools that scientists used to construct an unique national identity around notions of whiteness, health, class and sexuality. 
But what does it mean to be normal and why is it useful to understand it as a socially constructed concept?. In the American context, the notion of “normality” became very important during the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. It developed as a way of talking about race and sexuality in a way that was “polite” but still got across ideas about social hierarchies, especially those based on scientific racism. Author Julian B. Carter explains that “One of the most important effects of the concept of ‘‘normality,’’ and the sign of its power in dominant American culture, was the increasing occlusion of racial and sexual politics in ‘‘polite’’ white speech” (Carter, 2007). “Normalcy” was just one of the concepts used to justify eugenics, by using the neutral language that nineteenth century science employed “normal” became synonymous with civilized, hygienic, heterosexual, christian, white, and by conflating these concepts in the idea of “normalcy” they became the default. 
In 1944 the Cleveland Health Museum with the YWCA and other commercial partners hosted a contest in order to find an American woman whose measurements were the closest to Norma’s. This contest indicates that Norma’s measurements were not only a description of some average measurements, by declaring Norma a “normal woman” she became an ideal to aspire to. Urla and Swedlund explain that ”Although anthropometric studies such as these were ostensibly descriptive rather than prescriptive, the normal or average and the ideal were routinely conflated. Nowhere is this more evident than in the discussions surrounding the Norma contest”  (Urla and Swedlund, 2000). It is worth noting that there was no contest around Normman. 
The ideas around fitness and body measurement were used to control women’s bodies, this is relevant because as Carter explains“The nakedness of all six statues is there-fore not an empty nod to the artistic tradition of the classical nude. Rather, that nakedness  foregrounds sexual difference and the importance of the sexual reproduction of the racial family” (Carter, 2007) In this framework it is understood that it is the duty of  women to continue civilization through proper reproduction which is achieved by engaging in normal heterosexual reproductive activity and by having a normal white and fit body.  Even though Norma’s average measurements became very popular in health discourse during the time, these ideas of femininity were replaced very soon by thinner and more sexually appealing feminine bodies, such as fashion and pinup models. Urla and Swedlund explain that “Norma and subsequent representations of the statistically average woman would become increasingly aberrant, as slenderness and sex appeal—not physical fitness—became the premier concern of postwar femininity” (Urla and Swedlund, 2000).
The place where Norma and Normman were exhibited is also very meaningful, the Cleveland Health Museum opened in 1936 and was the first permanent health museum in the country; its original purpose was to “portray the advances made in medical and health science and to promote personal and community hygiene.” (Health Museum, 2018). From this mission we can deduce that even though this museum is different from an art museum, it is looking to build a narrative about the health of the nation and its scientific advancements. Anderson argues that art museums are “active agents in the processes of national memory-making that silence and racialize certain individual and group identities.“ (Anderson, 2020). I would argue that health museums are also agents in the process of memory making but from a perspective of a medical relationship with the body, a relationship that is often built on dominant bodies and excludes and patologizes racialized and minoritized bodies. 
Norma and Normman serve as memory mechanisms in many different ways; they can be understood as part of the history of medicine in the United States or as one of the ways eugenic ideas became mainstream. They can also be understood as objects that reflect the history of sexual and gender identity. As exhibition objects Norma and Normman can tell us a lot about what the culture that produced them valued and what museums at their time thought should be taught to the public. They contribute to collective memory to contextualize how our current ideas about normality took shape, so we can understand and make visible what once seemed invisible and normal to us.
References

Carter, J. (2007). The heart of whiteness: normal sexuality and race in America, 1880-1940. Duke University Press.   https://books-scholarsportal-info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/en/read?id=/ebooks/ebooks0/duke/2012-10-25/1/9780822389583#page=5 
Urla, J. and Swedlund, A. “The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture” In Schiebinger, L. L. (2000). Feminism and the body. Oxford University Press. https://books-scholarsportal-info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/en/read?id=/ebooks/ebooks0/oxford/2009-11-30/4/0198731914 
Anderson, S. (2020)  “Unsettling National Narratives and Multiplying Voices: The Art Museum as Renewed Space for Social Advocacy and Decolonization – a Canadian Case Study.” Museum Management and Curatorship 35.5: 488–531. https://journals-scholarsportal-info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/details/09647775/v35i0005/488_unnamvadaccs.xml
Health museum: Encyclopedia of cleveland history: Case western reserve university. (2018, June 23). Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://case.edu/ech/articles/h/health-museum
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