Susie Orbach's Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1978) didn't have the first, the last, or arguably the "most feminist" word on the subject. But the therapist's popular book--even its title alone--may have widened awareness that there might be something specifically feminist to consider about body size, particularly for women.

Not the First Word

An explicitly feminist "fat liberation" movement arose in the U.S. in the 1970s. (1) Activists Judy Freespirit, Aldebaran (now Sara Fishman), Lynn Mabel-Lois (now Lynn McAfee), and Karen Jones (now Karen Stimson) emerged during this time. Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the "Fat Liberation Manifesto" in 1973, naming fat oppression as sexist and taking "the so-called 'reducing' industries" to task for harming public health. (2) The Fat Underground engaged in marches, protests, and other radical actions to raise consciousness about this oppression and warn about the dangers of dieting programs, (3) and a group that formed to "develop an analysis of the oppression of fat women from the perspective of radical therapy" conducted women's rap groups. (4)

Maybe Not the Most Feminist

Orbach's book was criticized by some feminists (5) for not going far enough--for not debunking the assumption that fat women should seek to lose weight (the first edition's subtitle, after all, was "the anti-diet guide to permanent weight loss").

Definitely Not the Last

Organizations formed and grew through the 1980s and 1990s, and many more publications appeared. Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women started a sixteen-year publishing run in 1984. Books ranged from the scholarly anthology tided Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, with a number of contributions dealing explicitly with fat acceptance, to Marilyn Wann's ("the Abbie Hoffman of fat power" (6)) in-your-face Fad So? Because You Don't Have To Apologize for Your Size--as well as new editions from Susie Orbach. Of course, as the World Wide Web developed, more and more resources appeared there, many existing only online.

Today the words are many, and they can be confusing. Size-acceptance movements are emerging in a number of countries, while headlines insist that an obesity epidemic in the U.S. is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. There are scholarly journals specifically about weight, as well as fashion magazines targeting a plus-sized audience. Lawsuits have arisen against diet programs that make fraudulent claims and car manufacturers that won't provide seatbelt extenders; sometimes these developments inspire hateful anti-fat diatribes by journalism. New diet drugs are introduced amid concerns about harmful side effects; a few size-acceptance advocates have surprised their movement allies by undergoing controversial weight-loss surgery. There are calls to end what is called "the last socially acceptable form of prejudice," (7) that against the so-called overweight, and people of all sizes are committed to doing so as a matter of social justice. There's more and more obesity research, but even among the medical establishment there are suggestions that the research does not support promoting weight loss, and that most weight-loss attempts are unsuccessful in the long run. A "health at any size" approach is advocated by...