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Fat Women And Fatness

Decent Essays

Fatness is significantly gendered as well. As fatness lost its prestige in the twentieth century, women were increasingly integrated into public life through religious and social movements linked to their gender and maternal nature, like the temperance movement. Women have long been considered the source of the preservation and progress of civilization, making their behavior and appearance particularly important. So, with the denigration of fatness and the raising protestant fear of fatness as an indicator of gluttony, women were expected to remain slender as an indicator of their capabilities as mothers, wives, and progenitor of their races. Women were often urged to “avoid fatness because it was ‘degrading’ to their ‘sex and civilization,’” hoping to avoid the animus linked to fatness, a hostility exacerbated when combined with the racial animus imbued with the black female form. Furthermore, fatness was gendered through the desires of certain men, which were perceived as primitive. It was believed at the time that savage men preferred women who were fat due to their archaic belief in fat as an indicator of access to food, wealth, and elite cultural status. Thus, fat women were linked to primitive desires and primitive peoples, so that thinness and the Eurocentric beauty standards within which it is included became a means to differentiate themselves from savages and align themselves with modernity and contemporary high cultural status and sophistication. Therefore,

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