Eating Disorders - fieldi

Young Adult Women 151
with their attainment of the right to vote, received in 1920. And
the obsession increased. The flapper image of the late twenties into
the thirties further illustrates this point, with the flattened breasts
and curveless clothes. In the fifties women were given a reprieve as
domesticity was “in,” and the fuller figure was reaccepted. But in
the mid-sixties Twiggy became the role model of many women—a
prepubescent tubular body, which appeared to have the fragility of
a twig that might snap in the wind. Wolf says, “When women came
en masse into male spheres, that pleasure had to be overridden by an
urgent social expedient that would make women’s bodies into the
prisons that their homes no longer were” (184). Are women trying
to be less feminine in their attempts to compete in a male-dominant
society? Perhaps it is but a different version of the chameleon of
which I spoke earlier.
Wolf (1991) talks exquisitely of her “One Stone Solution” (186).
One stone, the British measurement of fourteen pounds, is the average
amount of weight women aspire to lose—a weight that will have
50 percent of dieting women well below their ideal weight that is
natural and beautiful to their bodies. But society set it up that way—
and women bought it. Without the extra thin body, a woman is not
truly successful. And as she struggles to attain and maintain it, like
quicksilver, she cannot hold onto it because physically she is crying
out for the sustenance she needs. Her mind and body are in conflict.
She is unable to be as successful as she might be in whatever
endeavor she undertakes.
Wolf cites research by S. C. Wooley and O. W. Wooley which
illustrated that preoccupations with weight lead to “a virtual collapse
of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness,” while J. Polivy and C. P.
Herman found that “prolonged and periodic caloric restriction
resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are passivity, anxiety,
and emotionality” (Wolf 1991, 187, 188). Thus Wolf concludes, “It is
those traits, and not thinness for its own sake, that the dominant culture
wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated
women, in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation” (188).
As a therapist today working with these young women, I believe that
Wolf makes a cogent argument, one we cannot ignore. In their relentless
pursuit of thinness, many of these young women are nowhere
nearly as effective in their overall performance as they have the capac-