When did women learn that being smaller made us more beautiful, lovable, worthy or acceptable?
In Part 1 of Obsession With Being Small, we start with our own earliest experiences of learning to take up less space — physically, emotionally and socially.
From body comments we heard growing up to being praised for thinness, people-pleasing, staying quiet and learning not to “rock the boat,” we explore how smallness can become about so much more than the size of our bodies.
Then we go back through history to look at the ever-changing female body ideal. From corseted waists and exaggerated curves, to the boyish flapper of the 1920s, the carefully controlled hourglass of the post-war years, Twiggy and extreme slenderness in the 1960s.
Along the way, we look at what was happening in women’s rights at the same time. Women gained greater access to voting, education, employment, public life and positions of authority, yet each new era seemed to come with another set of instructions about how the female body should look.
Sometimes women were allowed to be curvy, but only in the “right” places. Sometimes they were allowed into male spaces of power, but were still expected to appear youthful, delicate and physically non-threatening.
The ideal body kept changing.
The expectation that women should change themselves to meet it did not.
In Part 2, we’re heading into the 80s, 90s, the size-zero 2000s and the body ideals we’re living through right now.
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