The female body is historically and culturally intertwined with the idea of shame. Women are taught to be ashamed of their bodies, their breasts, their menstrual cycle, and their hairy vaginas. The female body carries long ago implanted messages of inferiority, weakness, and hysteria. Patriarchy has encouraged women to connect their bodies to intense feelings of shame and dislike. Feminism stands as an outpost of support for women, a declaration of female beauty and worthiness. I suppose, that’s what made Amy Erdman Farrell’s chapter on Feminism, Citizenship, and Fat Stigma so fascinating. And to what am I referring? I am in fact referring to first wave feminists use of fat stigma in order to gain popularity and thereby the vote. It was shocking to say the least.
Why would women dissociate themselves from other women in order to gain solidarity?
How does such a stance fit in with feminist ideals of equality and freedom from oppression?
As women fought for the right to vote, political cartoons fought back with images of the suffragette as either grotesquely masculine or corpulent. The idea being that “the suffragists’ fatness represents the way that their bodies and their desires—for votes and for power—are out of control” (89).
So, with fat stigma being used against them, the suffragists had a choice to make. In order to secure the vote, they decided to fight fire with fire. The prevailing image of a suffragette (from the suffragist side) was of a thin, attractive, white woman, which was in direct contrast to the fat, out of control anti-suffragette suffragette. Instead of completely overthrowing the model of fat as the negative and thin as the positive, these feminists played right into oppressive hands. According to Farrell:
The suffragists could have challenged the very use of the body to demonstrate fitness for citizenship…When faced with the very powerful anti-suffrage propaganda that visually represented the suffragist as beastly, fat, and uncivilized, the suffragists chose not to challenge these notions but, instead, to deny the charges, to assert that suffragists were more beautiful, more slender, more attractive, and more civilized than their opponents. 96
No challenge was made. No move to eradicate the standards set out by society. No kiss good bye to the chains of shame. Instead, the suffragists made it shameful for a woman to be fat, because it meant she wasn’t modern, she wasn’t civilized, and she wasn’t smart enough to desire the vote. I wonder though, why not take this opportunity to embrace all of the women who were part of the movement? Why not portray the right to vote as inclusive to all? It was the perfect opportunity to stand up to the power system and say a person…a woman…does not have to be physically fit in order to be a full citizen. Yet, they didn’t.
Though I wonder, what would an ad that challenges “the very use of the body to demonstrate fitness" look like?
In many ways I understand the thought process behind the suffragists. The main goal of the era was to secure women the right to vote, and things such as equality for women and body positive messages, well those could all wait until the vote was secured. If I hadn’t read Farrell’s Fat Shame, I’m sure I wouldn’t have even seen anything wrong with suffragist depictions of themselves. I would think that it made sense to choose to portray a woman who wants to vote as an appealing one, thereby making the action of giving women the right to vote an appealing choice. What I see now though, is that the problem is creating this idea that a woman who is fat is not appealing, not deserving of a vote because she is not beautiful. Frankly, the superficiality of looks has no place in the voting arena.
My closing thought: No person should be forced to feel shame about their body. And no woman should encourage the reinforcement of bodily shame, as all women have endured its influence. A much stronger feminist movement can come together if no women are left out in the cold.
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