Colette Dowling is an internationally known writer and lecturer whose books have been translated into twenty
languages. She is the author of numerous books, including Maxing Out, Red Hot Mamas, You Mean I Don't Have to Feel
This Way?, and The Cinderella Complex, which has been in print since it was first published in 1981. Her articles
have appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, New York, and Harper's. She lives in Woodstock,
New York.
Sample Chapter
Chapter 1
The Frailty Myth
A hundred years ago, women were pushed backward in a very particular way. Just as they were beginning to demand
education and political and economic power, they were stripped of the power of their bodies. Just as they began
to get ideas about fighting for justice, they were required, with all the persuasion of a moral movement, to cultivate
frailness. Nineteenth-century women were given to believe that weakness was their natural condition. It was a total
gaslight job. There wasn't a plot. No single group could be held accountable. What made the concept so powerful
was the influential mix-the various groups whose interests came together into a single compelling philosophy about
woman's purpose on the planet. That philosophy-some scholars have dubbed it "the frailty myth"-became
the rope that restrained women from developing physically, restricted them to small half movements, isolated them
in rooms hidden from the sun, and threatened them with the worst of all punishments should they refuse to comply:
the loss of their capacity to bear children.
The theory behind the frailty myth was this: Women could not be allowed to follow their own pursuits-physical or
mental-because every ounce of energy they could generate was needed for maintaining their reproductive processes.
No option was offered in this matter. In the nineteenth century female confinement was considered a social necessity.
Women owed it to the next generation, and the generations thereafter, to cultivate nothing but their fertility-not
mind, not artistry, and certainly not body. This became known as "the cult of true womanhood." Educators,
psychologists, churchmen, and physicians-particularly obstetricians and gynecologists-were its chief proponents.
Men were certain that if women weren't controlled, the very species (or "race," as they called it then)
was at risk. They drummed up a role for women, an idea called "femininity," an appropriate "character,"
an appropriate "look"-and with all of these, they persuaded women that their reason for being was essentially
heroic and thus worth giving up a lot for.
For years my image of Victorian women was narrowed by stereotypes. I had been taught that women of the late 1800s
were frail, overprotected creatures who didn't have much of a life. Everything they did seemed to require undue
effort. As a young woman reading about Victorian "ladies," I could only imagine trying to swim in the
ocean weighed down by wet bloomers and baggy blouses. The daily struggle with corsets and merry widows, the attempt
to walk, much less run, in huge skirts and hats-it seemed, to my generation, pathetic. Those women had lived their
lives according to bizarre rules, and courtesies, and restraint. Rags were used for mopping up menstrual blood.
Sex was a joke because Victorian men didn't know the first thing about the parts of women's bodies that give pleasure.
It was hard to see how the Gay Nineties could have been all that frolicsome.
Mine was, of course, a glib view of those times. To think about actual flesh-and-blood women living in that way-to
contemplate the hard, merciless doctors' couches on which they lay, trying to make sense of their ailments-would
have required more emotional imagination than I possessed. I chose not to relate. It was the same way I'd distanced
myself from my mother's history, thinking of her life as too strangely different from my own for us to have much
in common. Hers was another time; it might as well have been another country. I wanted to be safe from my mother's
rural Nebraskan history, her fifteen siblings, her diabetes-ravaged mother, the farm that failed, she and her sisters
were given to believe, because there weren't enough boys to do the heavy work. Because I preferred to think that
my mother and I were not quite the same under the skin-just as I viewed those strange Victorian ladies-I lived
for years without knowing important things, things that would have strengthened my appreciation of my own womanhood
and allowed me to see myself as belonging to a family-not only a personal family, but the historical family of
my gender.
Old habits die hard. In tracing the frailty myth back to the nineteenth century, I found myself at first wanting
to gloss over what I was starting to see: an inevitable connection between the women at the end of that century
and women of our day-a continuum of actual physical oppression in which all of us had been kept down. I wanted
to be able to name the final decades of the nineteenth century as the flowering of the frailty myth and move on.
But as I began to dig further into the journals, and studies, and diaries of those women, it became clear that
something fundamental to growth and development had been taken from them and that the loss was not only theirs,
but ours. More and more I began to see that the frailty myth hadn't died, it had only wedged its way a little further
underground. I wanted to comprehend the forces keeping women from their bodies, their physical strength and spirit.
The Frailty Myth is about the social domination of women's bodies. It is about girls' and women's restricted physical
development. It is about the attempt to keep them feeling as doctors, educators, and even religious leaders have
intended them to feel: physically limited. Unable to run long distances. Unable to play five sets of tennis. And
even more important, unable to raise a barn or (once it was invented) fix a car. Unable to go for a walk in the
woods unaccompanied. Unable to exist, in short, without the muscular heft and presumed physical assistance of the
other half of the species.
For centuries women have been shackled to a perception of themselves as weak and ineffectual. This perception has
been nothing less than the emotional and cognitive equivalent of having our whole bodies bound. The myth of women's
frailty has been so systematically entrenched that it could fairly be called a hoax. But a hoax is a conscious
deceit, while myths are believed in as truth. What propels them is complicated and invisible. The frailty myth
was driven by men's repressed wish to preserve dominion. To make the myth viable, society constructed elaborate
ways of keeping women cut off from their strength; of turning them into physical victims and teaching them that
victimhood was all they could aspire to.
Before Frailty
Historically, strength has been encouraged in women only when the economy needs it-during wars, while the men are
away, or when helping to pioneer new lands. But as feminist scholarship in the past quarter century has uncovered,
women in fact lived far more complicated and demanding lives over the course of the first millennium than you might
imagine if you looked at the picture of "true womanhood" to which women were restricted in the nineteenth
century. It was striking to learn, when it was first published in the late 1990s, that in Paleolithic times women
weren't sequestered in caves, sweeping up stone dust and suckling their infants, as male anthropologists had always
suggested. That particular view of Ice Age females' physical ability was the result of certain questions not being
asked, according to Olga Soffer, one of the world's leading authorities on Ice Age hunters and gatherers. Soffer's
research and that of other feminist scholars in the 1990s led to the discovery that Paleolithic women were strong
and physically active, and provided up to 70 percent of family nutrition. And they weren't just gathering nuts
and berries. Paleolithic women hunted small animals with bows and arrows and used nets to trap larger ones. Even
the children participated in these hunts. Women and children "set snares, laid spring traps, sighted game
and participated in animal drives and surrounds-forms of hunting that endangered neither young mothers nor their
offspring," reports Heather Pringle in an article in Discovery, "New Women of the Ice Age." "They
even hunted, on occasion, with the projectile points traditionally deemed men's weapons."
The new research opens to question the idea that women and families, from the beginning of human time, relied on
male strength for their survival. Even the much vaunted killing of very large animals for meat, long associated
with Ice Age man's superiority, was rare, owing to the sheer difficulty of slaying a six-thousand-pound pachyderm
with a short-range spear, Soffer explains. "If one of these Upper Paleolithic guys killed a mammoth, and occasionally
they did, they probably didn't stop talking about it for ten years."
Women's strength was appreciated and made use of in later societies as well. In the Minoan civilization on the
Greek island of Crete (this flourished between 6000 b.c. and 1450 b.c.), bull vaulting was popular among aristocratic
youth. Only recently have we learned that men and women worked as bull-vaulting teams. They actually took turns,
one grasping the horn of a bull to steady it while the other somersaulted over its back. "The equal partnership
between women and men that seems to have characterized Minoan society," Riane Eisler wrote in The Chalice
and the Blade, "is perhaps nowhere so vividly illustrated as in these sacred bull-games, where young women
and men performed together and entrusted their lives to each other." It may sound apocryphal, but many urns
and other artifacts show women's participation in bull vaulting. Yet we never heard about these Amazonian women
until recently.
In ancient Greek and Roman times women hunted, rode horseback, swam, ran, and drove chariots. In Sparta, whose
social organization was not typical of Greek city-states, men lived apart from women in military barracks until
they turned thirty. Forced to live on their own, females became thoroughly independent. Not surprisingly, young
females were encouraged to develop strength. Spartan girls were taught to foot-race, wrestle, and throw discus
and javelin.
In the Middle Ages women often showed athletic courage. They jousted at one another with lances, on horseback.
Some were fine archers. Others competed in a forerunner of the modern game of darts that involved throwing eighteen-inch
projectiles. But however skilled they might become, they never got to the elite levels of competition. Occasionally
they were invited to keep score. Often they made awards presentations. Sometimes they were the awards. But they
could never know the thrill of victory because any important contest was closed to them. Even at the tournaments,
so central a part of medieval life, women were "little more than cheerleaders for chivalry," as two sports
historians have put it. This exclusion of women whenever big athletic competitions were organized continued up
to and including the modern Olympics.
But left to their own devices, women happily threw themselves into the competitive fray. Roberta J. Park, who's
written widely on the history of sport, says that women in the eighteenth century had prizefights with one another.
In an odd kind of marital minuet, husbands and wives staged fights against other couples, using swords or quarterstaves
and competing for cash prizes. Even wrestling had the odd female combatant. Margaret Evans of North Wales was reported
to be such a powerful wrestler that even at the age of seventy, "few young men dared to try a fall with her,"
Park tells us.
In the 1700s the most popular activities of women were running and racewalking. In 1765 a young woman completed
seventy-two miles from Blencogo, Scotland, to Newcastle in two days. It was worth a mention in Sporting magazine,
in 1806, that a woman racewalker in her forties was "victorious" over a younger man. In fact, in hindsight,
women had begun to mark their turf as champions of endurance marathons. Women's individual achievements at the
time included walking for a month with less than ten or fifteen minutes of continuous rest, walking and running
more than four hundred miles in six consecutive days, and defeating all men contestants in endurance marathons.
Women's walking races were "significantly more frequent than those for men," according to one researcher.
In the 1820s British and Scottish girls and women between the ages of seven and eighty-five were gaining money
for their families and public notoriety for themselves with pedestrian races. During the 1850s women in New York
and in the Midwest performed exhibitions in saloons, walking back and forth for hours along wooden planks measuring
fifteen to thirty feet. In the late 1800s the sport gained even more in popularity as media coverage of women athletes
increased. Between 1876 and 1881 women's walking and running events took place on sawdust ovals in major cities
throughout the United States. Reports Dahn Shaulis (University of Nevada), who made a study of nineteenth-century
women's endurance efforts, "In music halls, indoor arenas, and national guard armories around the country,
women walked against men, participated in multi-day women-only races, and sometimes walked solo, to break endurance
records." Paying crowds of hundreds, and sometimes several thousand, watched and gambled on the women walkers.
Journalists noted that to gain large crowds, women athletes were forced to attempt increasingly difficult feats,
such as walking four hundred meters every fifteen minutes for thirty or forty consecutive days. Religious preachers
publicly condemned pedestrian sport as "evil" and "coarse." In 1879 the Brooklyn Women's Temperance
Union protested against both women walking on Sundays and the alcohol and tobacco use and gambling that took place
among their spectators. These races were soon ordered closed by the New York City Police Department. By 1880 the
"pedestrian industry" had all but collapsed. Schools and universities forbade females from endurance
walking and running. And the modern Olympic Games excluded women from running events until 1928.
Not all physical feats were pursued for recreational purposes. In America in the 1700s, women performed backbreaking
labor in helping to pioneer a new country. Many "became part of the movement to stake out new farms and towns
in the western back countries," writes historian Nancy Struna, "and this meant clearing trees and planting
fields and few neighbors." In the South, developing plantations required of women efforts that often were
equal to men's. Mrs. Francis Jones, who with her husband carved a plantation out of the wilds of Virginia, stunned
the official auditor of property boundaries when he saw how strong she was. Yet, he put in his records, she still
retained that lovely female daintiness men so feared strong women would lose. Though she showed "nothing of
ruggedness or Immodesty in her carriage," the auditor wrote in a 1710 report, Mrs. Francis Jones not only
worked in the field, but would "carry a gunn in the woods and kill dear . . . catch and tye hogg, knock down
beeves with an ax and perform the most manfull Exercises."
Following the shift from agrarianism to industry that formed the Industrial Revolution, millions of women and children
moved to the cities, where they performed menial and frequently dangerous tasks in factories and mills. Again,
and notably, these were times when women's physical capacities were valued by the economy-especially in light of
the fact that they could be paid a fraction of what men got for doing the same work.
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Excerpted from The Frailty Myth by Colette Dowling Copyright 2001 by Colette Dowling. Excerpted by permission of
Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may
be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Review
�Rich cultures value thin women, and poor cultures fat women, but all male-dominant cultures value weakness
in women. That�s why Colette Dowling�s The Frailty Myth is radical in its well-reasoned, readable, wise exposé
of the reality, importance, and future of female strength.�
�In the twenty-first century, Americans are going to have to rethink the idea of the physical inferiority of women
because of books like The Frailty Myth. Dowling overturns the old Victorian idea that women are the weaker sex.
. . . This is a call to arms for female athleticism among girls and women of all ages.�
--Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls and Fasting Girls:
The History of Anorexia Nervosa
Random House Web Site, May, 2002
Summary
Can
women be equal to men as long as men are physically stronger? And are
men, in fact, stronger? These are key questions that Colette Dowling,
author of the bestselling The Cinderella Complex, raises in her
provocative new book. The myth of female frailty, with its roots in
nineteenth-century medicine and misogyny, has had a damaging effect on
women's health, social status, and physical safety. It is Dowling's
controversial thesis that women succumb to societal pressures to appear
weak in order to seem more "feminine." The Frailty Myth presents new
evidence that girls are weaned from the use of their bodies even before
they begin school. By adolescence, their strength and aerobic powers
have started to decline unless the girls are exercising vigorously--and
most aren't. By sixteen, they have already lost bone density and turned
themselves into prime candidates for osteoporosis. They have also been
deprived of motor stimulation that is essential for brain growth. Yet
as breakthroughs among elite women athletes grow more and more
astounding, it begins to appear that strength and physical skill--for
all women--is only a matter of learning and training. Men don't have a
monopoly on physical prowess; when women and men are matched in size
and level of training, the strength gap closes. In some areas, women
are actually equipped to outperform men, due partly to differences in
body structure, and partly to the newly discovered strengthening
benefits of estrogen. Drawing on extensive research in motor
development, performance assessment, sports physi-ology, and
endocrinology, Dowling presents an astonishing picture of the new
physical woman. And she creates a powerful argument that true equality
isn't possible until women learn how to stand up for
themselves-physically.
Table of Contents
1. The Frailty Myth
Before Frailty
Behold the Cult of Invalidism
The Masculinity Crisis
Out of Confinement
Shattering the Menstrual Myth
2. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
Becoming Feminine: The Gender Effect
Learned Weakness
Throwing Like a Guy: The Mystique of Innate Ability
Comparisons (or, Are We Fated to be Weaker?)
Shrinking Bodies, Shrinking Brains
3. Getting Them Out of the Doll Corner
Perceived Physical Competence
The Coaching Factor
The Dad Factor
Crossing the Swinging Rope Bridge: Programs for Change
4. Endangered Bodies
Shrinking Self-Image
Adolescence: The Crisis Years
Entering the War Zone
Double Bind
5. Can I Play?: The Struggle to Get into the Game
Title IX, or, the Fight for a Physical Education
Suing for the Right to Play
Admission into the Ultimate Game: The Olympics
Winning as We'd Never Imagined
The Abominable Sex Tests
Media, Marketing, and the New Female Contender
6. Closing the Strength Gap
Men's Fear of Women's Strength
The Myth of the "Mannish" Woman
New Ways of Assessing Performance
The Backlash
The Estrogen Effect
The New Physical Woman
Going the Distance
7. Physical Equality: The Final Stage
Physical Assault: Keeping Women Down
Trauma: Freud's Little Detour
Dangerous Lessons in Passive Resistance
Fighting Back
Unlearning Passivity
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Reader's Guide