I've long been haunted by the image of Cosette, in the film adaptation of Les Misérables, singing from her lavish bedroom about wanting to be free. Her life would have seemed charmed from the outside, especially by those in nineteenth-century France who struggled to stay alive, yet she envied the freedom of those outside her door. She couldn't, of course, know how hard the lives were of those whom she watched, and those she watched would have scoffed at the suggestion that they had it better than she did. I, however, keenly saw and felt her struggle. I've spent my life constructing a cage for myself, with bars built out of societal and familial expectations for women. But inside the cage, I simultaneously long to be free and am afraid to leave. In my desire to appear normal, to fit in, I have constrained myself out of fear of what will happen if I leave this cage. So I watch the world around me, and like Cosette, I wonder what it's like to live outside the walls I've carefully constructed to make it appear as if I'm embodying, or at least trying to, Western societal expectations for what it means to be a woman.

I don't think I'm the only woman in this cage, or at least a cage that is very similar, constructed by the same discourses, the same ideals as mine. After all, other Western women are subject to the same media images, same notions of romance, the same movies and TV shows as I am. Women like me grew up in an era of privilege simply because we were white, cisgender, and middle-class. Ostensibly, and at least in form if not function, the feminist movement worked for us. We did not grow up expecting to stay at home, unless that is what we wanted, in which case, we could do that, too! We went to college en masse. We became CEOs. We were evidence of the success of the women's movement—so much so that many of us disavowed the feminist label. We didn't need it anymore—see, we could do anything a man could do and look better doing it. We really could have it all. And then, once we reached this semblance of power, many of us stopped fighting and settled into our new roles of faux power. We adopted the discourses of the bodily colonizer, the capitalist, and suggested that if we could do it, anyone could. Therefore, our work was done.

In reality, though, we used to be held in with a corset, then by a girdle (Friedan Reference Friedan1963; Wolf Reference Wolf2009), but now our cage is invisible and all the more toxic.

What we perceive as “freedom” is not truly free but freedom to act within the constraints of a cage that limits how we can behave, look, be, and think. Even our professional success isn't true success: “Women middle managers are acceptable as long as they are male-identified and don't force too hard up against the glass ceiling” (Wolf Reference Wolf2009, loc. 472–76). At lower levels, women are tolerated when they demonstrate little ambition, conformity, more respect for men than women, and low self-esteem (Wolf Reference Wolf2009). Yet we still experienced some success, and we were told that the reason we didn't achieve more was our own fault, for not being perfect enough. And, shouldn't we feel grateful for what we did have?

This mythical safety that we perceive our cages provide us as white women affects us in a special sort of way. Feeling simultaneously successful and the tenuousness of that position has led us to live within a narrow range of possible life and appearance options; the consequences for violating those norms is swift and harsh. Therefore, we hold ourselves to impossible standards of perfection, imbue those same expectations in our children, students, and mentees, and quickly punish those who are outside of the cage, whether by choice or by social structure. These behaviors cause often unrecognized harms to ourselves but, more troubling, they lead us to marginalize, silence, and hurt trans and nonbinary persons, fat women, and persons of color. It is the latter that is uniquely troubling. In this essay, then, I hope to provide some insight into the societal factors that cause us to enact those harms. But in doing so, it should be clear that this insight should not be perceived as permission for white women to continue in the same manner. Instead, I hope it will be read as writing for white women to help us understand this cage and, hopefully, to either find a way out or, at the minimum, to stop working from the cage to oppress, suppress, and harm anyone who does not fit neatly into it.

I wonder if there isn't some insight in my own battles with disordered eating, although I was never officially diagnosed with an eating disorder. There were times, times when I was the hungriest and most self-loathing, that I directed some of this anger outward. As Naomi Wolf states, “I turned an eye cold with loathing on women who evidently lacked the mettle to suffer as I was suffering” (Wolf Reference Wolf2009, loc. 3519). I directed it at, writ large, those whom I perceived to be willfully and flagrantly disregarding the societal body standards I was fighting so hard to maintain. Who did these people think they were, living lives unfettered by societal expectations for how they should eat, exercise, and live? Neglecting compassion for them or for myself, I was angry when people stopped for fast food on the way home after a long day at work. Angry when someone could eat a donut from the breakroom. Angry that eating was fun. Or perhaps, just jealous. And I was mad at myself. Mad that I had to hammer and deprive my body to fit a societal ideal in order to be successful. Mad because I wanted cake. Mad because I was tired. Mad because I was so damn hungry. Mad because I'd chosen this, took the steps to lose weight. Mad because I ostensibly held the power to “heal myself,” but I just didn't know how to do that or even where to start. I'd trapped myself in a cage gilded by societal expectations, and I didn't know how to get out. And, therefore, I was mad at everyone and anyone else who wasn't trapped. Enacting what Harriet Brown refers to as the “queen bee syndrome” or when “women who have worked their way up the corporate ladder, usually in a [man]-dominated career, and think other women should have to do the same” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 152), in my hunger-fueled irrationality, I thought that other women should have to do the same and, if they didn't, it was their fault if they suffered the societal consequences.

Like Cosette, I watched people who didn't carefully monitor their diet, appearance, and fitness and who therefore appeared to be free from the societal strictures that had locked me in. I wondered what it would be like to be free from my cage. But it felt and still feels impossible. That is how strong this cage is. I fight my instinct to control food every day, and I wonder if there isn't some insight in my anger. I was, from most appearances, the embodiment of the successful career woman, and only I knew the limits of that cage. I was and am afraid to leave the cage, because I knew what I'd lose—my hold on my perceived power was so tenuous that I was fighting every day and in every way to hold onto it. I expected others to do the same—I thought if I could do it, then they should too. And this, perhaps, is one bit of insight into what motivates women to shame other women, to put other women down, to fight only for ourselves. We know how tenuous our hold on power is, and, perhaps, we feel that our hold on our position is dependent on the support of the men in our rooms. So, we kowtow to their needs and interests.

This is, altogether, a deal with the devil. Because there are conditions to our place in society, and those conditions cost us our bodies, lives, and souls. Those conditions continue to suppress, marginalize, and murder nonwhite, noncis bodies. “The misogyny of the most powerful white men—who are the least subject to moral and legal sanctions and, indeed, may inflict harm with impunity—clearly harms the most vulnerable women disproportionately. But it is we, as white women, who tend to enable it, in ways that may be more or less connected with the aim of self-preservation” (Manne Reference Manne2017, loc. 538).

Yes, we really are complicit.

I know there is more to the rampant, white-women harms that are being perpetrated against persons of color, women of color, and those less privileged. I know because I felt the same pressures many white women feel, had been that woman at times, and felt those pressures so much that I shrank myself and my world to one that I could control, stepping outside myself only to write and theorize. Still, today, I want to be the image of the perfect woman, complete with a perfect life. Sometimes, often when reluctantly watching Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, I find myself wanting so achingly to be her—to be normal, to look perfect from the outside. So it is that I realized that the same pressures that kept me small were keeping me in the pursuit of a bodily perfection that would never actually make me fulfilled and happy but would just make me appear that I was from the outside. To actively participate in the process of no-bodying through desiring normalcy was both something in which I was invested and was also nobody I wanted to become. But to pursue the fulfillment of this new vision of myself, as someone beyond the no body I was socialized to become, would mean giving up my pursuit of this ideal. For most of my life, I've wanted to fight against injustice for all others who conflicted with that ideal, but I still expected that I, myself, would be meeting that ideal. Apparently, what was fine for others wasn't fine for me. What hypocrisy.

I've spent my life trying to appear normal, but as I have learned about myself, critically evaluated my place, I have never felt like I belonged. And seeking to appear normal has meant that I had suppressed somewhere deep inside myself who I really was, what I wanted, how I felt, what I believed in, everything was suppressed in pursuit of perfection: “The demands on [my] body become so ingrained in the socialization process that [I became my] own jailer” (Giovanelli and Ostertag Reference Giovanelli, Ostertag, Rothblum and Solovay2009, 290).

The cage, my own personal glass ceiling, constructed by me according to the societal ideals presented in mass media, created an almost docile body. My only violations were remaining single and pursuing a man's role of knowledge-creator as a professor, but those roles were at least palatable because I was thin and super nice. But any time I reached out of that cage a little—if I wasn't nice, if I provided critical feedback to white men or white women in power, they wielded their displeasure as a way to put me right back into that cage. And there I usually went, beating myself up for not being nicer, for not being more intentional with my words, for speaking when I could have been quiet. Because oftentimes, sexism is so insidious that I—that we—internalize it, beginning to think it is our fault for wanting to move beyond the cages that confine us.

Men (and white women) were much happier with me when I complied. There are very real consequences for taking up space, and for having a voice. All white cisgender women learn that quickly. And so, especially with a tenuous amount of power, the ease with which women who don't accommodate the mold are kicked out, fired, labeled undatable, called spinsters, that power is lost. And white women, we see that, either through our own experiences or by witnessing the fall from grace of others.

Damn, it's scary. This holding onto some semblance of power is incredibly tenuous and almost always hollow.

Although women across Western society are indeed still oppressed, white women also still act as oppressors. In its most modern conceptions, women's appearance of equality with white men is measured through their placement in professional roles and aggregate college attendance rates. Yet our so-called rise came at the expense of Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. Who was left in our Feminine Mystique home? Who took care of our children, our houses, even our bodies? Someone did, and if it wasn't us doing both—work and housework—then the person who stepped in wasn't a man partner; it was more likely someone we hired to do that work. And that person was most likely to be a woman of color (Wolf Reference Wolf2009). We rose at their expense. We were, eventually, allowed into the boardroom, and sometimes we even got to sit at the table. But, for the most part, the only other women in the room looked like us. And we still needed to be told how to act while sitting at the table; we were told we needed to “lean in,” to act like men in order to have a hope of being heard, let alone listened to. The solidarity promised in the feminist movement extended to us and some others who looked like us, but not much further. Once in our relative seats of power, we froze, afraid of losing what we'd gained by fighting for our sisters—or even for suggesting that we thought it might be a good idea.Footnote ¹

What we failed to recognize or pretended not to feel was how precarious our positions of faux power really were. Resistance to the assertion of white, cisgender women's power had gone underground. The occurrences of overt resistance to women “leaving the kitchen” (although those persist, too) were replaced with systemic and structural challenges to women in power. Direct control of the body in the past was accomplished by keeping women pregnant and limited to a finite set of physical spaces with appropriate attire and behavior. Those controls were replaced by “ideals” foisted upon women by their partners, bosses, churches, advertising, and then even by other women. Direct control of the body was replaced by the insistence that women must control their own bodies (Bordo Reference Bordo2003). This indirect control was (and is) successful—and so insidious. As white women, we told ourselves and others that it was their responsibility to control themselves and their bodies. Those controls then limited our success. We could be successful, indeed, but we must look a certain way first. As a result, we either hammered our bodies into resistance, evidenced by the still-growing business of torture-by-fitness-video, or we were reluctant to pursue this bold new world we were told was open to us until we'd shrunk ourselves appropriately.

Ah yes, we became smaller so that we could exist in spaces previously limited to men. We were told we had to shrink ourselves to feel like we belonged in the boardroom. Eating disorders, labeled as such to be pathological, grew in frequency and severity. Control over women's bodies is the literal embodiment of what these discourses are created to do—make us take up less physical space as the realization of a social wish that we would take up less mental and emotional space as well (that is, to go away). The incredible shrinking woman becomes invisible and is, therefore, no longer in the room—she is no longer fighting for, or fighting with, power. “The danger with wanting to be thinner is that there's always room for less of you” (Rosenfeld Reference Rosenfeld2014, loc. 196).

This rise, our ascent, hasn't been without cost. We still don't have equity. Look to the gender pay gap if you need an example, although the examples of how equity hasn't been reached are everywhere. The women's movement isn't done, not even for us.

I don't understand, although perhaps I should, why that turns some white women to aggressively work to subvert the rights of those with less social privilege and access than they do. There are many trite sayings about this—elevating one elevates all, and so on, and those are true, but the fact remains that perhaps we don't exactly have it so good after all either. As white women continue to invest in making ourselves and others small, when we succeed, we succeed only in becoming so small that our bodies become no-bodies, as in there are no bodies to be seen or heard from. Our socialization has taught us, and we have largely fallen into believing it, that if we can make ourselves small to the point of literally having (and therefore being) no bodies, then we will have succeeded. But at what cost? And at whose expense do we participate in the ongoing social no bodying of ourselves and others? This cage not only restricts our bodies, it requires us to be small, so small we are almost invisible. Our emancipation isn't so emancipating if it results in a pursuit of impossible norms that cause us to reject our body, sexuality, and identity. The harms to ourselves are real.

As are the harms to other women. White women continue to be complicit in the silencing of nonwhite, trans, and fat bodies. This silencing often begins subversively under the guise of promoting “health” as code for a way of looking that is often thin, fit, and impeccably coiffed. Magazines, bloggers, YouTubers, and more build reputations on helping women to achieve an impossible norm, thereby emphasizing beauty ideals and reinforcing that to be anything else is wrong. These messages are also often strengthened at home. Susie Orbach writes of the tendency to blame mothers for perpetuating harmful stereotypes on their daughters (Orbach Reference Orbach2018), yet mothers are also trying to teach their daughters how to survive in a world that requires women to meet social beauty norms first. Familial pressure to align with appearance norms usually isn't malicious, yet the impact is the same.

There is also a persistent resistance across American society to seeing large(r) bodies as healthy. Some of the resistance to large(r) bodies being seen in a positive light can be seen in social media posts and “scientific” objections to the “body positive” movement and inclusive marketing campaigns that include women of different shapes and sizes. White women were not alone (but many were prominent voices) in suggesting that body positive movements promoted obesity (see, for example, McConnell Reference McConnell2018, or the study conducted by Lin and McFerran Reference Lin and McFerran2016 on the positive impact on “bad” eating of the Dove campaign). Further, since “the large body [is] seen as noncompliant, disobedient, and undisciplined” (Aphramor and Gingras Reference Aphramor, Gingras, Rothblum and Solovay2009, 98), men and women reinforce the importance of thinness above all else through hiring and promotion decisions, social labels, and day-to-day treatment: “fat women are more stigmatized than fat men . . . fatness is not just a physical state, but is often used as evidence of a character defect. Women who are fat are viewed as deviant, lazy, out of control, unattractive, and nonsexual” (Prohaska and Gailey Reference Prohaska, Gailey, Rothblum and Solovay2009, loc. 4537). Despite more inclusive marketing campaigns, mass media largely still reinforces the perceptions of fatness as evidence of character flaws: “Viewers are simultaneously reminded that violating expectations of physical appearance, perhaps by being fat and female, will be recognized and subject to gossip and discrimination” (Giovanelli and Ostertag Reference Giovanelli, Ostertag, Rothblum and Solovay2009, 290). Similarly, many television shows and movies warn women about the dangers of straying from the pursuit of the body ideal through examples of those who stray from societal definitions of femininity.

Every day there is another example of the resistance of some white, cisgender women to becoming true allies. In addition to more subversive forms of sizeism, white women also perpetuate overt acts of racism and hate:

I can't forget that white women were a large voting bloc in the United States for Donald Trump in 2016 (and, in preliminary numbers, the percentage of white women who voted for Trump increased from 47% to 55% in 2020 [Lenz Reference Lenz2020]). Why is it that some white women shame fat bodies? Why is it that some white women support political candidates who not just further marginalize them via policies that support bodily control (for example, anti-abortion legislation) but also support the erasure of trans and queer bodies in social life (for example, bathroom legislation)?

From almost the inception of the women's movement in the United States, equal rights meant equality for white women, as evident in the original suffragist rejection of the antislavery movement (Farrell Reference Farrell2011). Not only were we afraid to continue to fight for women's rights after achieving our own semblance of power—right to access, right to space, right to existence—some of us also actively campaigned against these rights for others. Do white women, like white men, see the elevation of these bodies as a challenge to their own power and place in society? Are white cisgender women consciously or subconsciously seeing the new postcolonial feminist movement as challenging to their quasi-equality with white cisgender men? As Brown discussed, “[Thin people] enjoy the privilege of not having to deal with the shame and stigma heavier people encounter every day. And, let's face it, no one wants to let go of privilege. Once we have it, we feel entitled to it” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 154). But also, the shift of power from direct to indirect, as evidenced by the shift from a literal corset to the corseting of expectations, had a related shift in how power was deployed: “We believe, deeply, that we need to police ourselves and one another when we break the unwritten rules, when we don't look or behave the way we're ‘supposed’ to” (151). This is an impulse to regulate others the same way that we are told we must regulate ourselves. We become our own panopticon and the panopticon of society; we don't need men to provide that regulation anymore because we are doing it to ourselves and to others. “Foucault suggests that the modern subjects similarly participate in the operation of power in the form of surveillance, by closely monitoring themselves for increasingly minute transgressions” (Stinson Reference Stinson2001, 8). When women inspect not only themselves but also fellow women in this way, women become the enforcers of the very discourses that marginalize them (Stinson Reference Stinson2001).

Altogether, white women are challenged by a double bind: We can accept the rightness of body ideals and reach a level of professional success that resembles, at least for some, the power held by white men. But by accepting those standards, we must also constantly work to reify the goodness of the beauty ideal through near constant attention to our bodies. And, since the body ideal is impossible, our failure to reach it reinforces our status as “other”—almost, but not quite, equal to the white man. The pursuit of impossible body standards hurts us too, even as it harms women of color, trans women, and women who are fat.

So I wonder, how can we move forward? How can we see not just the cost to our lives but also the value of nonwhite, trans, and postcolonial feminisms? For me, it was only through the insight gained from exploring postcolonial feminism that I was able to recover and begin to reclaim my body. It is only through ongoing dialogue with trans feminist theory that I can continue to recover and grow. Trans and postcolonial feminist work supports the emancipation of all women. There is much to learn from those efforts that shed light on how the so-called empowerment of women hasn't been empowering for many. It provides insight into how we are still suffering from the impact of bodily control mechanisms evidenced in disordered eating patterns and the expectation that we hammer, mold, and shape our bodies into a form that is not natural nor healthy nor necessary for success.

For example, it wasn't until I read Z's theorizing on being too much (Nicolazzo Reference Nicolazzo2019) that I recognized the connection between the legislating away of trans bodies with the anorectic's desire to disappear as symptomatic of similar efforts, one overt, the other covert, to no-body us. I hid from relationships for years because I felt like my body dysmorphia and associated habits were too much for someone else to handle. I wouldn't even ask. So this theorizing about being too much helped me to better see how the same impulses that led me to seek to shrink, to disappear, were perhaps related to the same processes that attempt to write out the trans body through discourse and legislation. I am not suggesting that the pain and influence of these processes are the same. But they are similar, and without this work, I wouldn't have this insight into my own no-bodying.

This insight, this theorizing, this lens, this understanding, are critical to the feminist movement.

My concern, now, is how we, meaning white, cisgender women, can join in solidarity without co-opting and therefore redirecting and diluting the movement. Indeed, this essay risks being a navel-gazing flagellation of myself and white women that, by the virtue of academic publication, reifies my rightness and authority to speak on matters of race without any real action or effort on my part to effect change. The solution is not here, in this essay, nor is it held by white women, even those white women who are true allies. Indeed, positioning white women as “true allies” only serves to reproduce socially constructed divisive categories.

I have seen, lived, and experienced the co-opting of second- and third-wave feminist movements by white, cisgender women. That result has been not just the silencing again of nonwhite and trans voices, but the simultaneous and subversive transformation of radical movements to reinforce and reify traditional systems of gendered power. There will not be equity for white women until we also seek freedom for all women. And the way to do that is not by taking over these larger feminist movements, but to listen, seek to understand, support, and challenge our conceptions of gender. As Tressie McMillan Cottom states, “ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty. Knowing the difference is part of getting free” (McMillan Cottom Reference McMillan Cottam2019, 71).