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The Real Skinny on Why We Feel Fat

Meghan Cox Gurdon says it's not the models who make us feel fat. It's the clothes.

MODERN WOMANHOOD is caught in a trap of its own making we are hoist by our own petard. It is female emancipation that has put us on diets and treadmills. Before you throw this magazine down in disgust, consider that the more economic and political power women have acquired, the fewer clothes we have worn; the fewer clothes, the less friendly concealment. That is why our bodies, themselves, have come to be of such supreme--and exasperating--importance.

Say what you will about corsets, they at least gave every woman a waist and made a pleasing contrast with zaftig hips. In olden days, the contours of one's calves, let alone one's thighs, mattered nor at all, for they were veiled in sumptuous layers of skirting. Rich or poor, chunky or sylphlike, all women used to wear garb which conveyed femininity whilst concealing womanhood's more problematic hip-thigh-buttock zone. Not only were women's pillowy backsides hidden from male eyes, they were also hidden from those of their owners. And if you can't see your thighs, why would you worry about them? My guess is that most women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries passed their whole lives without once scrutinizing their cellulite. (Our great-grandmothers didn't even have a name for it; according to Webster's, "cellulite" only entered the language in 1974.).

Today women make more money, and are courted more assiduously than ever in history by politicians (though less assiduously by men). Women govern, run companies, adjudicate lawsuits, and, in Britain, operate their own special taxpayer-funded unit. So why is it that from dressing rooms across the English-speaking world comes the querulous cry: "Do these pants make me look fat?"

Summer 2000

You're On Your Own, Baby

Midge Decter argues that the woman problem arises not from lack of freedom but because of it.

NO ONE, I REPEAT, has ever led a life with so many private options in it as the modern enlightened woman. It is nor surprising that she is often confused and restless and vulnerable to a lot of abstract notions about what she should be doing. It is not surprising that the family appears, for the moment, to be a highly unstable institution. The family...

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