In Defence of Big Women Who Take Up Space in the World

I t’s a hot day in early summer, and I’m trying to hide my shameful body in the sand by the polliwog pond. The polliwogs have grown into fat squiggly black dots, with slender tails. They swim in funny, jerky motions across the pond, where dragonflies hover above water shimmering slimy and mysterious in the July sunshine. The polliwogs are metamorphosing into frogs, and I’m metamorphosing too, although not in a good way. The long skinny body that I’m covering with sand looks nothing like the film stars in the movie magazines of the 1950s. The skinny calves and knobby knees, the legs that grow and grow, the narrow hips and bony arms, the unruly curly hair. Not only is my body embarrassingly long, it’s also embarrassingly thin. During the school year, I pad my clothes with extra sweaters and tops in an attempt to look like the petite curvaceous actresses I see in the Hollywood films. I’m cheerful by nature. But taking an upbeat approach can also hide a myriad of fears. And that day, I’m struggling with a problem I can’t fix. In just a few months, I’ve grown a horrifying six inches. Only minutes before, my mother, Jane Swan, insisted on measuring me against the storeroom door of our cottage, along with my friend who lives down the beach. My friend is tall too, and in the past few months, she has grown a respectable one and a half inches; now she stands five foot nine. But I’m six foot two, and I’m only twelve. My mother is also tall—she’s five foot ten—and she often tells me to stop slouching. She doesn’t understand that there’s a world of difference between our heights, the same difference that exists between someone who is five foot two (short) and someone who is five foot six (average). Like any kid, I have the usual challenges of school work and sports competitions, and I tackle them by working hard. The measuring contest has presented me with something unfixable: I’m big. Maybe, god forbid, I will get bigger.

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T he word “big” is troublesome to me. It was then, and for many women and gender-fluid folk with feminine identities, it still is. Being big is synonymous with being unfeminine. To be tall is to be big, and to be big is to take up space, lots and lots of space—a cultural no-no for women of all sizes who are taught early on that they should take up less room, an echo of the days when Virginia Woolf said women’s job was to reflect men back to themselves at twice life size. And for that reason, many women, myself included, will unconsciously work to take up as little space as possible, deflecting compliments or swallowing their feelings to protect other people’s egos. Even today, being feminine still means projecting a smaller public self, and women who do assert themselves are usually told they’re too bossy, too dominant, too loud, and that they need to talk in a soft-spoken voice. Instead, we should all be encouraged to speak up, assert more, be bolder and more authoritative, and—here it comes—take up more space even if the cultural ideal is the shape of a girl’s slender, unformed body. As a woman’s body ages, her fuller breasts and rounded hips are often considered unsightly. So, for god’s sake, whatever you do, stay skinny and don’t take up too much room. But everyone takes up space as they travel through their lives. Taking up space is how most of us learn who we are and what makes us happy. This is especially true for women, who are often taught to be smaller than their brothers and the boys they know, and, later on, smaller than their partners, or their husbands, or their colleagues. And if they become mothers, they may be expected to step aside and cede space to their children. A few days before that afternoon at the polliwog pond, a boy picked me up in his arms and tried to throw me into the lake. She’s too big for me, he announced when he fell down, taking me with him. How come she weighs so much? he asked my giggling friends as we struggled to our feet. Your weight increases exponentially with every inch you grow—that’s why. Tall women are “big” because they weigh more, so they aren’t easily carried across a bridal threshold or swung up in a boy’s arms like other girls. Tall and big. They go together. And being big, feeling big, is the sensation of overflowing what is designed for your fellow humans. It’s the chair that doesn’t quite fit or the table whose underside hits your knees at an uncomfortable angle. When the measuring contest ended, I ran off to the polliwog pond and ignored my friend who was calling for me to come back. Until my mother marked down six feet two inches on the storeroom door, I had been able to fool myself into thinking I was the same height (more or less) as everyone else. What a mistake! T he personality theory that we now know as the inferiority complex was developed by Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychotherapist who argued that feeling inferior to others plays a key role in human development. When I was growing up, the concept caught on as a meme, and we were all running around saying so-and-so had an inferiority complex or admitting that we had an inferiority complex ourselves, which was why we did what we did. Today, the word “trauma” is used in much the same way to explain human behaviour. Femmie Smith’s trauma was her size, although she wouldn’t have used that word to describe her unhappiness then. She used to be six foot one—until she asked a surgeon to cut four inches out of her femur bones so she could be the more feminine height of five foot ten. So it was obvious to me when I was sent off as a young journalist to interview Femmie that she was suffering from an inferiority complex. On slow days at the tabloid where I worked as an education reporter, the city desk would give me what they called “colour” stories. Once I swam in a bikini allegedly to investigate pollution in Toronto Harbour. They ran my story on the front page with a mock-serious photo of me diving into the lake and a caption: To Swim or Not to Swim in our Murky Harbour. The Telegram’s reporter Susan Swan kicked up her heels and dove into the dark waters of Toronto bay for a look. She found it so murky, she couldn’t see very well . . . I’m really doing a headstand on a sand bar, and the photo shows my legs sticking out of the water, legs that hadn’t been shortened like the vulnerable thigh bones of Femmie Smith. And now I was facing the woman who had undergone surgery because her height had caused her too much anguish. Femmie had spent eight months in Toronto’s Orthopaedic and Arthritic Hospital after two operations, one on each thigh bone, with two months in a cast for each leg. When she answered her door and saw me standing there, her mouth fell open. You could have the operation too! she exclaimed. I smiled politely and nodded, although I had never entertained the notion of shortening my height, even after my first husband had thoughtlessly suggested it when we were teenagers. I was twenty-two and busy getting ahead with my writing. She was the one (not me) who had an inferiority complex. I was done (or so I told myself) with my terror about being unfeminine. The photograph taken that day shows me towering over Femmie, looking at her skeptically while I hold my notepad. I had on my ’60s costume: a blond fall (I was too busy reporting to wash my hair), a very short miniskirt, and a see-through blouse. If people are going to stare, you might as well give them something to stare at. I sometimes wore stacked gladiator sandals as part of my defiance, but that day I had on flats. Femmie was standing in the doorway of her modest suburban home in Newmarket, Ontario, and I could see that although she had once been my height, she was now several inches shorter than me, and she was pretty, with cropped, curly dark hair and a round friendly face. There were no signs of her operation except that her arms looked too long for her torso. She led me into her living room, offering to introduce me to the orthopaedic surgeon who could cut inches off my thigh bones, which, she claimed, would bring me the relief she felt. When her mother brought in a plate of sandwiches, Femmie pressed me again to talk to her surgeon, and once more, I demurred. It was a relief when she began telling me why she had her operation. Her mother was five foot ten and a half and her father was six foot two (my height), but of course, I didn’t mention that. I sat there, stunned, my notepad on my lap, scribbling down what she said, trying to radiate sympathy while feeling secretly horrified by what she had done. This is what I was finding out: She and her parents were Dutch immigrants, and most of Femmie’s suffering over her height happened in the Netherlands when she was a young teenager. She quit junior high and did her schoolwork at home in order to avoid being mocked by her schoolmates. She stopped going out in public because she hated people making wisecracks about her size, and she did all her shopping by telephone. She didn’t attend parties. She was bitter about the time a boy had asked her to dance and then run away as soon as she stood up. As a teenager, she insisted on sleeping in a crib with her head and feet pressed up to the headboard and end of the bed in the hopes that this arrangement would stop her from growing. It was a literal manifestation of my own childhood prayer for my head to stop its march to the ceiling. It was strange that the Dutch children had been so cruel, because the Dutch are the world’s tallest people. According to Rachel Pannett in a 2021 article in the Washington Post, “The World’s Tallest Population Is Shrinking.” Their height started increasing in the 1950s, thanks in part to the Dutch milk program in the schools; only recently has it begun to slightly decline. So it wasn’t as if Femmie had been six foot one in a Mediterranean culture, where people tend to be shorter. Over the past thirty years, anthropometric historians have done studies that show height is a biological shorthand that measures a society’s well-being. According to New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger in his essay “The Height Gap,” published March 28, 2004, height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, and nutrition has a lot to do with it. Height spurts occur in infancy, from the years six to eight, and during adolescence. Bilger says one of the reasons the Dutch are so tall may be that they have the best infant care in the world. Northern European populations have grown taller than American populations, according to Bilger. Immigration to America may be partly responsible for that lack of growth, because many immigrants are shorter than Americans when they arrive. But it’s also related to nutrition and the American love of fast foods. During the First World War, Bilger says, the average American man was two inches taller than the average German. Since 1955, northern Europeans on average are three inches taller than the average American. In 2004, when Bilger wrote his essay, the average American man was only five foot nine and a half, less than an inch taller than the average height of soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Bilger notes that the National Center for Health Statistics, which conducts periodic surveys of as many as 35,000 Americans, says women born in the late 1950s and early 1960s had an average height of just under five foot five. Those born a decade later are one-third of an inch shorter. According to Greatlist, the average height of both Canadian and American women is currently five foot four, while the average height of Canadian men is five foot ten. During Femmie’s operation, Dr. James E. Bateman cut out a four-inch section of her femur, the large bone that runs from the knee to the hip joint. The ends of her femurs were brought together and fastened with a metal plate designed for her at the Orthopaedic and Arthritic Hospital. Then the bone that had been removed was grafted onto the femur to give it extra strength. Muscles, blood vessels, and nerves were left untouched because they would shorten on their own. Each operation took three hours, and Femmie endured endless months of physiotherapy sessions afterward to make her thigh muscles strong again. This was an unusual surgery, because Femmie’s surgeon didn’t do height reduction operations unless there was a good medical reason, like one leg being shorter than the other. But Bateman said he had reduced Femmie’s height because she had “severe psychological trauma” over her size, and not because she wanted to be shorter than her boyfriend. In a Canadian newspaper story dated September 22, 1967, Bateman is quoted as saying that Femmie had a definite physical abnormality. It’s hard to imagine a medical doctor saying now that a young woman who stood six foot one in her stocking feet was physically abnormal. Fashions change. Now short men and women seek out the painful ordeal of leg-altering surgery. Short women who do it sometimes complain that they’re treated like children at work, while short men say they need to be taller in order to get respect and avoid insults like “garden gnome.” An early limb-lengthening technique, known as the Modular Rail System, used a surgical nail attached to an external frame that fits around the leg. More advanced techniques are now used, and these surgeries encourage bone growth, which adds inches to the length of the leg. Although leg lengthening still involves an uncomfortable operation and a year of physical therapy, patients who want to have a leg shortened have an easier time now. If Femmie had been able to have modern orthopaedic surgery, she would have been able to walk out of the hospital the day of her surgery. I couldn’t find any records of Bateman doing another height reduction surgery like the one he did for Femmie. Nor was I able to find any information about what happened to Femmie, who may be dead or living under a married name. If she is still alive, I imagine our conversation might go something like this: Me: I used to think you had an inferiority complex. It didn’t occur to me that I had one too. Do you have any regrets about your surgery? Femmie: No regrets. But I’m sorry I suggested you should get your legs shortened. Me: Well, there are so many ways to make yourself smaller. You know what I mean? Limiting your options, not reaching out for what you want, and going along with what others expect of you. When you and I met, I thought it was ludicrous to shorten your legs, but I was making myself smaller by doing the traditional things that young people my age were expected to do then: I was engaged to be married and working at a nine-to-five job at a newspaper when I wanted to write novels. Don’t think—write, a city desk editor advised me. Excellent advice to a journalist on a breaking news story. Not for a young novelist like myself about to marry someone who didn’t understand my writerly ambitions. F or many of us, our size is part of the way we pattern ourselves, and its influence affects us psychologically along with other markers, such as our class background, our race, and our gender identities. The person who is very tall as a child and then grows into a short adult may continue to see themselves as tall, just as the very tall child who remains tall all their life will never forget the feeling of being seen as oversized. Supermodels have made height glamorous in women, and the tendency to ridicule or disparage tall women isn’t as common now as it used to be, although former American first lady Michelle Obama said in her book The Light We Carry that, given the neighbourhood she grew up in, her height was more of an issue than her skin colour. She explained that it’s hard to know what we look like if we can’t see ourselves reflected back by other people. She wrote: “‘Tall’ became the label that got attached to me first, and it stuck with me right through. It was not something I could shake, not something I could hide about myself.” That afternoon by the pond, I’m burying myself in the sand, trying to do that very thing—hide. I’ve brought a pail and a sieve to catch the polliwogs and keep them in my aquarium at the cottage. But suddenly the idea seems childish and embarrassing, and I throw my kid’s pail into the bushes, determined never to play with it again. Adapted and excerpted from Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir About Taking Up Space by Susan Swan, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2025. All rights reserved.The post In Defence of Big Women Who Take Up Space in the World first appeared on The Walrus.