FEARING THE BLACK BODY
Fearing the Black Body
The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Sabrina Strings
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2019 by New York University
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Strings, Sabrina, author.
Title: Fearing the black body : the racial origins of fat phobia / Sabrina Strings.
Description: New York, NY : New York University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018026988| ISBN 9781479819805 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479886753 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)—Social aspects—United States. | African American women—Social conditions. | Overweight women—United States—Social conditions. | Obesity—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC HQ1220.U5 S77 2019 | DDC 305.48/896073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026988
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For my grandmother Alma Jean Green
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Original Epidemic
PART I: THE BEAUTY OF THE ROBUST
2. Plump Women and Thin, Fine Men
PART II: RACE, WEIGHT, GOD, AND COUNTRY
3. The Rise of the Big Black Woman
4. Birth of the Ascetic Aesthetic
5. American Beauty: The Reign of the Slender Aesthetic
6. Thinness as American Exceptionalism
7. Good Health to Uplift the Race
Epilogue: The Obesity Epidemic
Introduction
The Original Epidemic
“Actually Starving! A Prominent New York Man Dies in Sight of Food. Why Could This Be So!” This dramatic if slightly awkward headline appeared in the February 16, 1894, edition of the New York Times, atop an article that began, “Thousands of men and women in New York are starving, although they have plenty of money to buy the best food!”
The unnamed author of the article went on to quote what was described as a “prominent physician” on the state of the American diet and physique. According to the doctor, the situation was dire. “I say … that they are starving to death—slowly, but surely,” he stated, adding that although many of those afflicted were members of the middle and upper classes, they nevertheless looked “emaciated [and] appear to be consumptives.”1
This article underscored the deep anxiety felt by many in the nineteenth-century regarding the state of the American physique. Doctors in particular agonized over what they described as the “pale, thin, and puny” forms that were apparently proliferating around the country. Several described with horror the “narrow chests, and lank limbs, and flabby muscles, and tottering steps [that] meet us at every corner.”2 Thinness, it seems, was nothing short of an epidemic.
If in those years slenderness was considered a general American failing, the paleness, leanness, and malnutrition of women was particularly troubling. Prompted by the fragile state of their bodies, esteemed doctors wrote disquieting manifestos on the question of their frailty.
The writings of the prolific and well-regarded New Englander Dr. William Alcott, a distant relative of the novelist Louisa May Alcott, were typical. In his 1855 treatise The Young Woman’s Book of Health, Alcott lamented the reality that “our children, females among the rest, are trained by a community which is thus destitute of a true appetite.”3 He warned Americans to take heed of what he described as the “whole generation of women trained as a whole to tenderness, delicacy, nervousness, feebleness of muscle [and] want of appetite.”4 Being “tall, slender and delicate,” he claimed, did not prepare a young woman for the vicissitudes of life.5
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