I love to see pictures of hollywood babes from days past- they were beautiful women. Although makeup and clothes can hide and disguise flaws, I am pretty sure back then what you saw was what you got...as opposed to now...if the young girls with impossibly thin bodies cannot starve, use drugs to supress their appetite to lose weight (that they don't need to lose), be surgically enhanced OR reduced OR both, they can be airbrushed/digitally altered in any photo to attain the complete perfection that is impossible even for young babes. I am amazed by beautiful women who lived in a world where you were really beautiful. Perhaps there was plastic surgery in those days, but not on the level it is used now.
Have you ever seen paintings by Rubens?
The women portrayed as beautiful are generally plump, and certainly always have curves. That is usually ascribed to the fashion of the times.
So, why would the idea of beauty be for "full figured" women (and corpulent men)? Well, ever hear of a little thing called plaque (also known as the black death)? If a woman was plump, curvaceous, you could pretty well bet she didn't have plaque.
I've actually been surprised that, with the spread of AIDS (known in Africa as "the wasting disease") we haven't seen a return to the Rubenesque physique as the ideal.
The idea still hangs around when someone describes a full figured woman as "healthy."