Written by Rian Chase
Edited by Vanshi Kumar
Women’s excellence is a common theme in our daily lives. Whether it be Coco Gauff winning the US Open at only 19, Taylor Swift securing her 13th and 14th awards and announcing a new album at the recent Grammys, record-breaking triumphs by directors like Greta Gerwig, and Oscar nominations for truly sensational performances by women like America Ferrera and Lily Gladstone. However, we often see these women being discredited, insulted, and body-shamed, especially by men.
Similarly, when I was 13, I hated my body. I tried everything to make it look “better”: working out excessively, limiting my food intake, and wearing baggy clothing. As ridiculous as this insecurity seems now as I’m writing about it, it’s a real problem that I’ve faced in my life and detrimental to my self-esteem. I even have vivid memories from when I was as young as 13, telling myself that I was ugly and unlovable. I think that the reason that I’m so self-conscious about this is mostly because I’m a woman. A common theme with women in society is that we are constantly being put into boxes. By the age of 10, 1 in every 5 women has experienced an eating disorder. This is because society bases the amount of credit that they give for successes and also the respect that women are treated with how well their body conforms to the unrealistic standards that have been set for them.
Believe it or not, eating disorders, specifically in women, go back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; self-starvation in women was praised, seen as disciplinary, and used to acquire the same status as Roman Catholic Saints. For hundreds of years, women have been oppressed by unrealistic body standards.
But, progress was made in the 1600s. In 1689, a physician named Richard Morton discovered the symptoms of anorexia being displayed by a young girl and described her in his research as looking skeleton-like due to her starvation because of her fear of eating. Later on, Sir William Gull, a 19th-century physician, coined the term “anorexia” and noticed from his research that the disorder was most common in 16-23-year-old girls. At the same time, a French psychiatrist by the name of Ernest-Charles Lasegue described anorexia as a form of hysteria and noticed the disorder had a pattern. Lack of eating was most prevalent in women who were in protest of feeling as though they were suffocating and unable to show emotional distress.
Women were continually exposed to unrealistic standards and cruelty, which became especially known in the 1930s, with the case study of a young woman named Ellen West. While in her twenties, Ellen began to suffer from depression and also what was described as a “fear of becoming fat” because of her friends who were mocking her recent weight gain. The diary entries by Ellen showed her obsession with becoming increasingly thin by neglecting. In one of her entries, she writes, “I love sweets, – Heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream. But my true self is thin, all profile, and all gestures, the sort of blond, elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I will not…cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case”. But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife.” I think that this is an extremely powerful yet disturbing verse that shows the powerful grip that eating disorders had and continue to have on women, who are desperate to conform to societal standards.
Because of Ellen’s case, especially through this writing, researchers were able to see that eating disorders were triggered by social and cultural aspects of one’s life. This was remarkable progress, considering that before Ellen’s case was known, scientists considered eating disorders to be symptoms of tuberculosis or hormone imbalances, so it’s no surprise that doctors quickly dismissed the rising cases of them in women. However, women were continually demeaned by society, especially in the 1940s and 50s, with new TVs and beauty magazines pushing messages of perfection and conformity to women.
Then, the 70s brought more awareness to the harm caused by eating disorders. In 1978, Hilde Brusch published The Golden Cage, the first book that indicated the harm that was arising from eating disorders. Brusch commented on the increase in overeating and self-induced vomiting becoming more and more common among female North American college students and the death of star singer and drummer Karen Carpenter, who had died due to heart complications as a result of anorexia. Finally, in 1992, partially thanks to the media coverage of eating disorders due to The Golden Cage, eating disorders became a formal diagnosis. The 21st century marked a turning point in the research of eating disorders, offering many aspects of help. including nutritional, physiological, and medical assistance to many victims, which helped them to recover. However, many, women especially, are constantly exposed to criticism and unrealistic standards today. I think that as a society, we should do everything in our power to uplift women, as their strength, resilience, compassion, and talent have shaped the world as we know it today.
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