A Short (Neck) Story: 50 Years on and Women’s Bodies Are Still Being Described As Problems

Written by Taylor McDaniel, Mlitt Digital Journalism

This is the second in our series of twinned blog posts from students on the class ‘Feminisms: Continuity & Change’, inspired by their work at the Glasgow Women’s Library archive. Here Taylor McDaniel casts a sharp eye over archival representations of women’s bodies and their contemporary resonances.

Hold up. Stop right there. I need ask you a question. Now it’s a doozy, something you may have never considered before. Do you have a short neck? I think I may be afflicted by this ghastly gullet plight. Would you believe that I had never even considered this question before last week? It all began when I was looking through the magazine archives at the Glasgow Women’s Library.

Memo Magazine, 30 May 1969, cover: Glasgow Women’s Library archive

I came across an issue of Memo from 30 May 1969. This issue of Memo, a publication originally created and distributed for shorthand students at Pitman colleges, was full of all kinds of gems. There were articles about improving your shorthand technique, a spot about ‘get-ahead’ girls shopping at Co-Op, and a feature about jazzing up lunchtime (apparently sandwiches were passé in the spring of ‘69). The publication was initially interesting to me because it was aimed at women in the workplace, which seemed progressive and potentially supportive of women. 

 

All the advice a short-necked gal could ever need - Memo Magazine, 30 May 1969, page 6: Glasgow Women’s Library archive

The article that really caught my eye was Looking Good by Jenny Froude, a piece about ‘playing up your features’ and dressing to best accentuate your shape. This is where I was first introduced to the concept of a short neck. I’ve seen plenty of pieces, listicles, and magazine articles about dressing your pear-shaped, apple-shaped, block-of-cheese-shaped body to best highlight your features. But never did a short neck come into things. And the tone of the article is also particularly striking. I’ve rarely felt as personally attacked by something in a magazine as I was reading Looking Good. Memo seems to suggest that no matter what, their readers must have something horribly unpleasant about their body that needs to be hidden away from society. In the world of this article, women have to hide away their ‘heavy hips’, ‘plump upper arms’, and of course that dreaded short neck. Even women with a tall slender figure, something commonly regarded in women’s magazines as ideal, should be careful not to look ‘too dolly’ and remember to use accessories to ‘cut up [their] overall height’.  

Memo Magazine, 30 May 1969 page 6

Their suggestions for how to camouflage your many body shortfalls including your short neck (wear a v-neck shirt and a scarf) are accompanied by a line drawing of three identically shaped, long and lanky women in vaguely different outfits. This is somehow supposed to illustrate how the suggestions given will look on different body types. How is that supposed to work when the bodies are all the same? According to the article, these three ladies should have, respectively, a short neck, a high waist, and a figure which ‘isn’t as neat as a boy’s’ (whatever that means). Instead, they’re all tall and skinny with long, luxurious necks. 

This type of misrepresentation of different body types is still an issue today. In 2018, clothing company Boohoo was called out for using straight size models to advertise its plus-sized clothing line. This issue also leads to so much more than just wanting to see people who look like you when browsing for clothes or through a fashion magazine. In a 2007 study in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, Australian researchers found that women who viewed advertising featuring thin women were more likely to have anxiety about their weight, negative self-image and mood, and dissatisfaction with their bodies than women who viewed ads featuring women and men or ads featuring no people. 

455 million suggestions for dressing your (insert fruit here) shaped body - screenshot of google results 6 March 2019: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=dress+for+your+shape&oq=dress+for+your+shape&aqs=chrome..69i57.2880j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Today, 50 years after Memo broached the subject, a google search for ‘dress for your shape’ returns around 455,000,000 results. Stitch Fix, a subscription styling service featuring personalised clothing items, has a blog post with a handy ‘body calculator’ to help readers (and potential customers) figure out if they are shaped like a pear, an hourglass, an apple, or ... an athlete. Interestingly, there is still a fixation on elevating the thin, svelte physique, even designating this type of body shape with a descriptor outside the realm of inanimate objects and fruit.

Stitch Fix’s Body Calculator:

https://www.stitchfix.com/women/blog/fashion-tips/find-fit-for-your-body-type/

To give some credit to Stitch Fix, the actual text of their blog post does highlight that women should embrace their bodies, whatever shape they may be. But it’s easy to see how reducing women’s bodies to problem areas that need to be disguised could be seen as a far way off from celebration. It would seem that we’re still a long way off from magazines fully accepting women’s bodies as they are. But hey, at least I’ll have plenty of suggestions for how to deal with my short neck until we get there.

Click here to read Taylor McDaniel’s second blog, on women’s stories on screen.