Rumbles, page 21
From the beginning, the practice of eugenics relied heavily on lay participation, cultivated through population surveys, data collection and self-reporting. In an advertisement for the Anthropometric Laboratory potential visitors are encouraged to attend on the basis that, having had their body carefully observed and measured, they may receive a ‘timely warning of remediable faults in development’ (Figure 31). While evolution through natural selection was slow and unpredictable, eugenicists pointed to the role that an individual could play – in their choice of mate, in the education of their children, in the maintenance of a healthy weight – in the future progress of the race. The fat belly, now subject to exacting and authoritative methods of quantification, signified an unacceptable deviation from the physiological ideal.
The idea that it might be possible to establish what a ‘normal’ body looks like was first seriously pursued in the early part of the nineteenth century by figures like the Belgian scientist Adolphe Quetelet. An early pioneer of what he described as ‘social physics’, he was one of the first to apply insights from probability and statistics – usually confined to fields like mathematics and astronomy – to the study of the social world.288 In his treatise on the subject, Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale (1835), published in English as A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842), Quetelet extolled the virtues of the ‘average man’. By collecting and comparing data from individuals it was possible, he argued, to delineate ‘average bodily proportions’ and in doing so set the ‘limits within which variations […] must be kept in check, in order not to shock the taste’.289 In other words, setting the ‘average’ made it easier to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable bodies. The metric that Quetelet devised involved dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height measured in metres to produce a ratio; a ratio now better known as the Body Mass Index (BMI). As the rubric through which ‘obesity’ is defined, the BMI wields immense medical and cultural power, but its origins reveal its limitations as a useful indicator of health. Most problematic, Quetelet formulated his ideas based on measurements taken from French and Scottish samples, meaning that the ‘average man’ was created using only information provided by white Western Europeans.290 In addition to producing dangerous clinical blind spots – the overdiagnosis of some groups and the underdiagnosis of others – a statistical norm based on whiteness and maleness also serves to reinforce long-established structures of power. A fat belly can disqualify its owner from wielding power in society, on the grounds that they are morally deficient, mentally inferior, or simply lacking in the necessary self-control. And so, while Quetelet and eugenicists like Galton presented their methods as firmly grounded in the unassailable principles of scientific objectivity, it is telling that their statistical models tended to exactly reproduce rather than challenge the status quo.
Figure 31: Pamphlet advertising Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition
When Galton set up his makeshift laboratory at the IHE, willpower was viewed as primarily the preserve of white, educated men and it remained the basis on which everyone else – women, non-white, working class – was deemed to be unable to govern themselves. Such bodies are not so easily absorbed in the imaginary of the ‘national body’ and thus present difficulties to state authorities trying to create a coherent image of the ideal citizen. Considered from the vantage point of political institutions, diet arguably enacts a kind of coercion, a means of disciplining not only the gut but also the populace. Renaissance moralists, for instance, took the question of diet very seriously because they thought that a well-fed populace was easier to govern and more disposed to obedience. Ensuring not only that everyone had enough to eat, but also that they were discouraged from overindulging in alcohol, was – as countless fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors attest to – a remarkably effective means of social control. As Ken Albala argues in Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002), this was usually understood in terms of humoral balance, meaning that a ‘gluttonous people fed on choleric meats is ready to take offence at the slightest cause; melancholics invent false dangers to fret over; the phlegmatic loses all vigor and motivation. And of course a pusillanimous population is a threat to national security.’291 If the history of diets is, at least in part, the history of governance and the rule of the few over the many, then is the fat body a profoundly disorderly one? An etching by the eighteenth-century Scottish satirist Isaac Cruikshank, The Doctor and the Unruly Patient (1797), seems to suggest so. A frustrated physician chastises his grinning patient for growing ‘as fat as a porpoise’, who answers that he certainly has not ‘followed his prescription’, as he has chucked it out of the window (Figure 32). This gleeful insouciance suggests more than a thick-headed disinclination to do what is necessary to stay in good health; rather the patient’s refusal to submit to the authority of his physician gives some insight into the radical possibilities of being ‘unruly’.
Recently, fat activists and theorists have argued that rather than viewing fatness in terms of aesthetics or as a medical condition, we should recognise it as a political issue. If, as Kathleen LeBesco has proposed, we think of ‘revolting’ bodies in terms of their ability to overthrow authority, to rebel and protest, then fatness could be conceived of as a way of subverting dominant discourse and upending established authorities.292 Less easy to assimilate into the ideal of the national body – strong, self-sufficient, disciplined – the soft belly exposes the inequities and injustices that underpin modern society. Fat bodies are often described in the language of excess and inefficiency, viewed as less productive and therefore less valuable to capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the well-documented weight bias that women encounter in the workplace. While body size does not appear to have much impact on the career progression of men, studies have shown that women perceived to be overweight are consistently penalised in terms of hiring, salary and promotion. The problem also appears to be getting worse. A study from Harvard University analysed the attitudes of millions of participants between 2007 and 2016 and found that while biases based on sexual orientation and race were on the decline, in contrast anti-fat bias had risen by 40 per cent.293 Not much seems to have changed since William Banting wrote his Letter on Corpulence in 1863: fleshiness is still interpreted as proof of indolence and the vitriol directed at bodies that exceed what is ‘normal’ reveals the toxicity of such a measure. What is peculiar is the gendered dynamic at play in this kind of workplace discrimination, which is significant as it suggests that fatness might have different cultural resonances, political meanings and economic implications for women and men. Moving on from the question of body weight but sticking with the gut as a historically unruly organ, the final chapter of Rumbles enquires into the digestive politics of gender.
Figure 32: The Doctor and the Unruly Patient by Isaac Cruikshank, 1797
12 The Gender of the Gut
In 1899 an Australian newspaper carried an advertisement for a laxative that, on the face of it, seemed to have very little to do with the promotion of regular bowel movements. Instead of touting the product’s superior value and unique purgative properties, the advert derided the ‘mannish mode and airs’ of the ‘new woman’.294 Who was this woman and what made her so novel? As the Victorian period ended the so-called ‘New Woman’ burst forth into the world. Unlike her dowdy domestic forebears, she was educated, employed, politically active, unmarried, fond of bicycles and prone to wearing trousers. Known in Japan as an ‘atarashii onna’ and in Germany as a ‘Neue Frau’, these emancipated women provoked a widespread cultural panic over changing gender roles, the erosion of respectable feminine behaviour and the decline of the traditional family. The charge most frequently levelled at these new women, who were seeking a broader sphere of action in the world, was that to agitate for such a change was to struggle fruitlessly with the sensible restraints set by human biology. This was certainly the approach taken by the odd Australian advertisement for a product called ‘Bile Beans’, which proclaimed that ‘nature is against’ those seeking to do more than keep a home and raise a family, because the female ‘internal organism can stand less strain and needs a great deal more attention than does the male’.295 Here, as is almost always the case, sexual difference implies male superiority and female weakness, a handy biological justification for the social, political and economic domination of the former over the latter. What is distinctive, however, is the insistence on the gut as the chief cause of feminine frailty.
This particular advertisement implies that women are more prone to digestive distress than men and yet at various points on this tour through the curious history of the belly the opposite has also been true. Think of the young noblemen of the Renaissance learning to control their bodily appetites or the nervous poets of the Romantic era beset by ‘blue devils’ or the overworked clerks of late-Victorian London tortured by bouts of painful dyspepsia, the troubled belly has just as often been associated with men as with women. Even a brief glimpse at the long view of the cultural history of the gut reveals, then, how constructed any seemingly natural understanding of its relationship to gender is. Published at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of great social change that saw women agitate for the vote and enter the workforce in ever greater numbers, the Australian Bile Beans advert reflects the anxieties generated by such a shift and reveals once more where the intestinal world intersects with political life. Such anxieties were not confined to women; this period also saw established models of masculinity come under strain as a new culture of the body emerged that emphasised regularity as a test of true manhood. Taking a deep dive into the dietary cultures of the early twentieth century, this chapter examines the politics of peristalsis and asks what digestion can tell us about the history of gender. Along the way it picks up on two of the constipation-obsessed reformers introduced in Chapter Nine, spends time with the first celebrity bodybuilder and goes on hunger strike with militant suffragettes, all in an effort to better understand the gender of the gut.
The makers of Bile Beans, having characterised the stomach as particularly vulnerable to disorder and upset, marketed themselves almost exclusively to women. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and running well into the 1960s, advertisements for the laxative promised to not only restore regularity, but in doing so solve menstrual problems, improve complexion, brighten eyes and encourage weight loss. A poster from the 1940s is typical: a glossy-haired woman in high heels stares anxiously at a set of bathroom scales, but happily she need not worry as her nightly dose of Bile Beans has kept her ‘healthy, happy and slim’ (Figure 33). Not only did physiology predispose women to constipation, but sluggish bowels also threatened to undermine the successful performance of femininity. Inattention to digestion might lead to a thick waist and dull complexion, jeopardising marriage prospects and forcing women to adopt unattractive ‘mannish’ ways to compensate. While it is no surprise to find women in history being judged on their appearance and warned that their future happiness depended upon the cultivation of good looks, it is significant to find the movements of the digestive tract implicated in this familiar cultural narrative.
Bile Beans promised to maintain the dominant social order by managing the digestive process. A bold ambition that was bolstered by its origin myth, which held that a chemist by the name of Charles Forde had synthesised the unique preparation from a mysterious vegetable substance hitherto known only to the Aboriginal Australians. Though a 1903 investigation by the British Medical Journal and a court case a few years later concluded that they were, in truth, composed mainly of rhubarb, liquorice, cascara and menthol, the gelatinous beans remained popular well into the twentieth century and helped to establish constipation as a distinctly female ailment.296 Recent studies suggest that women are more likely than men to suffer from costiveness – or at least more likely to seek help for it – and the NHS identifies menstruation, childbirth and the menopause as common contributing factors, but the digestive culture that Bile Beans helped to create interpreted this disparity as evidence of a building crisis in modern womanhood. William Arbuthnot Lane, the surgeon who we encountered worrying over his patients’ colons in a previous chapter, was convinced that women were at far greater risk of intestinal stasis due to a combination of physiological and social factors. Women were, he insisted, not only physically weaker, anatomically compromised and constricted by unnecessary corsets, they were also hampered by prudishness and social convention. This reluctance to discuss toilet matters could lead to all manner of trouble. Waste backed up in the digestive system sapped vitality and inhibited the appetite. The constipated woman was, according to Lane, a rather unlovely creature. Slowly poisoned by the toxins amassing in the lower intestine, her appearance deteriorates – the ‘buttocks become flat and flaccid’ and breasts ‘waste and flop downward’ – and the patient becomes increasingly irritable and unhappy.297 Cursed with fading looks and a bad attitude, such women were unlikely to marry and would remain childless; and with constipation on the rise in the developed West, this could, he warned, lead to falling birth rates, jeopardising productivity and threatening the integrity of the national body.
Figure 33: Advertising card for Bile Beans
While Lane advocated a rather drastic surgical solution to the problem of chronic constipation – the removal of a large section of the colon – less extreme treatments were available. One could, for example, simply begin the day with a bowl of wholesome breakfast cereal. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, branded cereals were promoted as not only cures for constipation, but also the secret to beautiful, vital womanhood. A 1930 advertisement for All-Bran, for instance, features two women, one who has retained the ‘bloom of youth’ and another who is ‘wrinkled, gray, careworn, far older than her years’; while one has attended to her bowels, the other endures the ‘dull brain’, ‘pimply skin’ and ‘bad breath’ that comes from neglecting digestive health (Figure 34). More than canny marketing, these claims were grounded in the popular medical culture of the period, specifically in the transatlantic exchange of ideas on the role of the gut in overall wellbeing. Exemplified by John Harvey Kellogg’s 1907 trip to London to attend Lane’s classes on gastrointestinal surgery at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, this sharing of ideas helped to establish the consensus over the threat of autointoxication explored in Chapter Nine. The American approach to digestive health distinguished itself from the British in one key respect: while Lane emphasised its relationship to temperament, reformers across the pond were exploring its spiritual dimensions.
Figure 34: Leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran, 1930
John Harvey Kellogg managed, with his younger brother Will, a popular health resort in Michigan called the Battle Creek Sanitarium: an impressive complex that featured a hospital and nursing school, as well as guest accommodation and facilities that included a golf course, a swimming pool and a dining room. The resort was operated according to the health principles of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a Protestant denomination to which the Kellogg brothers belonged. Born out of what came to be known as the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept through the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventism preached the imminent and literal return of Christ to earth, after which the righteous would finally ascend to heaven. What distinguished it most starkly from other Christian denominations was the emphasis it placed on health matters. As Ellen G. White, proclaimed prophet and co-founder of the movement, explained: because ‘spiritual vigour’ depends on ‘physical strength and activity’, service to God must begin with the health of the body.298 Inspired by divine visions and her interpretation of biblical teachings, White developed a model of health that emphasised hygiene, moderate diet and chastity. Believers were instructed to exercise regularly and preferably in the open air, abstain from alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, and follow a vegetarian diet rich in nuts and pulses. This wholesome regimen was designed to ward off the temptation to indulge in less wholesome pursuits. Most dangerous among these was the sin of ‘self-pollution’ or masturbation, an activity that Adventists held responsible for a wide range of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual problems. To Kellogg, masturbation constituted a form of self-abuse that exhausted the body’s supply of nervous energy, inviting disease and – in especially severe cases – courting insanity. And any life-long commitment to resisting these dangerous urges must begin with breakfast.
