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Figure I.1. “Actually Starving,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 1894.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the famed Seventh-day Adventist already known for his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, but not yet known as a purveyor of breakfast cereals, concluded in his Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease, “Particularly in this country, and especially in the cities and towns, girls as a rule are found to be decidedly lacking in physical development.”6 What the fair sex in America needed, Kellogg contended, was a nutritional revolution because their poor eating habits produced bodies that were “scrawny” and “waspish.”7
It was more than a simple question of health or even aesthetics. The slenderness of American girls was regarded as nothing less than a threat to the nation. An 1888 article from the Washington Post that appeared under the headline “Are Girls Growing Smaller?” exclaimed, “The girl of the period ranges from 140 pounds down in some cases to 80 pounds or less.… In England and Germany the figures are higher.… Eighty pounds of femininity is of course, not much.” And, the writer added, “our women will go on getting thinner and thinner until they disappear. It has happened in Boston already. The American stock … can’t hold its own against the big-boned strong-built foreigner. The Irish have crowded the Yankee out of New England.”8
The weight of American women represented, to many, a national black eye. But was it truly the case, as was often suggested, that these women were simply nutritionally uninformed? Given the right information, would they gain in flesh and, by proxy, in health, strength, and beauty?
The evidence suggests otherwise. Many well-to-do women it seems were trying to be slender at a moment when doctors routinely attacked slenderness as unhealthy.9 The historian Adele Clarke noted that women of the fashionable classes were “wasting in style.”10 The svelte style, being contrary to conventional medical wisdom, had clearly been motivated by other factors.
Indeed, while many considered thinness an American shortcoming, for the adherents of the style, slenderness served as a marker of moral, racial, and national superiority. This attitude is on full dsiplay in an 1896 article from Harper’s Bazaar titled “Are Our Women Scrawny?” It begins with a reflection on the slenderness of American women: “American women in general are still thought to be sallow and scrawny.” The article’s anonymous author contests this assertion, claiming that while poorer women may be malnourished, few women of the privileged classes are so slim as to look peaked, as may have been the case with their foremothers. Today, the author asserts, American women have a “wholesome glow in their cheek” and a bit more flesh on their bones, both of which are a testament to the “wholly unmeasured success” of the American experiment.11
Yet, while praising a new and laudable “roundness” to the figure of the modern girl, the author nevertheless betrays a preference for traditional American slenderness. Of the shifting outlines of the nation’s women, the author wrote, “One cannot help noticing in every metropolitan assembly that the feminine litheness and flexibility for which the republic has been famous is already on the wane, and that the opposite extreme is menacing.”12
Figure I.2. “Are Our Women Scrawny?,” Harper’s Bazaar, Nov. 1896.
That fatness is described as “menacing” is telling. The author provides a sense of the foreboding associated with excess weight. Not only does stoutness supposedly sabotage the nation’s aesthetic identity, it also evokes the poor eating habits and immorality of the European elite. Worse still, extreme or “gross” corpulence slides into an association with primitive Africans. The author spells this out for the reader: “Stoutness, corpulence, and surplusage of flesh” are never desirable “except among African savages.”13
This raises several questions. First, what led some well-to-do Americans to believe that slenderness, especially among women, was both aesthetically preferable and a sign of national identity? How did fatness become a sign of immorality? How did fatness become linked to “Africanity” or blackness? And finally, if the medical establishment just over a century ago feared the meagerness of the physiques of (elite white) women, when and how did they come to view fatness, especially among black women, as the greater threat to public health, as they would in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with the “obesity epidemic”?
In this book, I examine the history and legacy of the preference for slimness and aversion to fatness, with attention to their racial, gender, class, and medical contours. This book enters a decades-long conversation about the preference for slenderness and the phobia about fatness in the United States. Much of this research describes the emphasis on slenderness for “women.”14 But while most authors show that an aversion to fatness and a preference for slenderness has been most evident among middle- and upper-class white women, few have addressed the role of race and class status in the development of these dispositions.
Relatedly, scholars have shown that the fear of fatness commonly targets low-income women of color, and especially black women.15 These and other scholars, including Sander Gilman, Jennifer Morgan, and Janell Hobson, have shown that black women’s bodies have long been treated as being in “excess.”16 Still, few have attempted to explain how, historically, fatness became linked to blackness. Amy Farrell’s 2011 book Fat Shame stands out in that it underscores the entwined racial past of fat stigma and the thin ideal. The book does not explore, however, how these racial connotations developed, nor does it explain the centrality of anti-blackness within them.
We also learn little about the role of morality in much of the existing literature. R. Marie Griffith’s landmark 2004 text Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity shines in this respect, offering a compellingly deep dive into the admonitions against gluttony and fatness in Christianity. Nevertheless, though it reveals that during the nineteenth century the fit body was used to buttress claims of racial and ethnic superiority, questions remain about how these relationships developed and were popularized within the American mainstream.
This work departs from much of the existing scholarship in that it provides a historiography of the development of pro-thin, anti-fat biases. That is, while several studies have explored the historical antecedents of our contemporary size biases, none, to my knowledge, have endeavored a historical analysis that examines the key figures involved in their propagation, as well as the sociocultural and political factors contributing to their reinforcement. This book seeks to address this gap as possibly the first historical study of fat phobia and thin fetishism in the West, with an emphasis on the intertwined racial, gender, and moral issues involved in their advancement.
I argue that two critical historical developments contributed to a fetish for svelteness and a phobia about fatness: the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism. Racial scientific rhetoric about slavery linked fatness to “greedy” Africans. And religious discourse suggested that overeating was ungodly.
These rationales for anti-fat bias had been circulating relatively independently in parts of western Europe for more than two centuries. Not until the early nineteenth century in the United States, in the context of slavery, religious revivals, and the massive immigration of persons deemed “part-Africanoid,” did these notions come together under a coherent ideology. In the United States, fatness became stigmatized as both black and sinful. And by the early twentieth century, slenderness was increasingly promoted in the popular media as the correct embodiment for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women. Not until after these associations were already in place did the medical establishment begin its concerted effort to combat “excess” fat tissue as a major public health initiative. In this way, the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used
