Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body Read Online Free PDF Page A

provided a classic statement of this theme. As a privileged woman, she focuses on the social construction of femininity as delicacy and domesticity, and it is as clear an example of the production of a socially trained, "docile body" as Foucault ever articulated:

    To preserve personal beauty, woman's glory! the limbs and faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands, and the sedentary life which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves. As for Rousseau's remarks, which have since been echoed by several writers, that they have naturally, that is since birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking—they are so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation. That a girl, condemned to sit for hours together listening to the idle chat of weak nurses, or to attend to her mother's toilet, will endeavor to join the conversation, is, indeed, very natural; and that she will imitate her mother and aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence Nor can it be expected that a woman will resolutely endeavor to strengthen her constitution and abstain from enervating indulgences, if artificial notions of beauty, and false descriptions of sensibility, have been early entangled with her motives of action . . . Genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies, and glory in their subjection, . women are everywhere in this deplorable state. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. 17

    A more activist generation urged escape from the prison, and, long before poststructuralist thought declared the body a political site, recognized that the most mundane, "trivial" aspects of women's bodily existence were in fact significant elements in the social construction of an oppressive feminine norm. In 1914, the first Feminist Mass Meeting in America—whose subject was "Breaking into the Human Race"—poignantly listed, among the various social and political rights demanded, ''The right to ignore fashion." 18 Here, already, the material "micropractices" of everyday life which would be extended by later feminists to include not only what one wears but who cooks and cleans (the classic "Politics of Housework" by Pat Mainardi), 19 and even, more recently, what one eats or does not eat—have been brought out of the realm of the purely personal and into the domain of the political. Here, for example, is
    a trenchant 1971 analysis, presented by way of a set of "consciousnessraising" exercises for men, of how female subjectivity is trained and subordinated by the everyday bodily requirements and vulnerabilities of "femininity":

    Sit down in a straight chair. Cross your legs at the ankles and keep your knees pressed together. Try to do this while you're having a conversation with someone, but pay attention at all times to keeping your knees pressed tightly together.

    Run a short distance, keeping your knees together. You'll find you have to take short, high steps if you run this way. Women have been taught it is unfeminine to run like a man with long, free strides. See how far you get running this way for 30 seconds.

    Walk down a city street. Pay a lot of attention to your clothing: make sure your pants are zipped, shirt tucked in, buttons done. Look straight ahead. Every time a man walks past you, avert your eyes and make your face expressionless. Most women learn to go through this act each time we leave our houses. It's a way to avoid at least some of the encounters we've all had with strange men who decided we looked available. 20
    Until I taught a course in the history of feminism several years ago, I had forgotten that the very first public act of secondwave feminist protest was the "No More Miss America" demonstration in