To be tall is to be big – and to be big is a no-no for women of all sizes

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Susan Swan’s latest book is Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir About Taking Up Space, from which this essay has been adapted.

In my life, being big has always been something to contend with.

It’s not just a matter of finding clothes and shoes. Doctors and dentists don’t give you enough anesthetic. You have to writhe in discomfort before they up the dose of painkiller. When I broke my elbow, a medical team gave me too little anesthetic and I could feel the pinch of the surgeon’s knife, so the operation had to be stopped.

As a child, other kids laughed at me on the street. A short teenage boy made his friends crack up by saying it would be a biological impossibility to have a child with me. The eyes of another teenage boy filled with tears when he realized I was his blind date. He also developed a headache. A girlfriend at a sock hop told me no boy wanted to embarrass himself by dancing with me. Why? I was too tall. In a sneering tone, another boy said he asked me out because he knew a girl my size would be grateful for his attention. Strangers asked if I played basketball, hardy har har. I would say no, although of course I did. Isn’t it too bad you’re a girl when you’re so tall, the mothers of my friends liked to coo, failing to understand that it felt like they were wishing me a life of rejection.

I was 14 when the boy who became my first husband told me about a magazine article on the Nova Scotia giantess Anna Swan. She lived from 1846 to 1888, and exhibited with P.T. Barnum. Maybe you’ll join the circus too, he joked before suggesting I get four inches cut off my thigh bones so I wouldn’t be a freak like her.

His remark terrified me even though Anna was 7-foot-6 and weighed 418 pounds and her family was not related to mine. Nor did I suffer from a pituitary tumour, which is what had caused her extraordinary height.

Nevertheless, from that day on, I prayed no one would find out about Anna Swan. The thought of growing up to become a giantess filled me with horror. What if my family really was related to hers, and I grew another seven or eight inches? Was that what adult life held in store?

A scene from the memory bank:

I’m sitting alone in the murky light of a friend’s rec room, watching my grade-six friends jive, kid-style, to Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley. I love jiving, but nobody asks me to dance even though I’m decked out in my favourite outfit, a stiff green-felt skirt decorated with poodle decals and a blouse with a Peter Pan collar.

I’m still sitting by myself when Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On by Little Richard is put on the record player. One of the other girls shimmies her shoulders as she dances by me and announces: The boys aren’t asking Susan to dance because she’s too tall.

Did she really say that? She did. I can still feel the sting of her words as she delivers the bad news: Nobody wants you for a partner. Before she pointed this out, I didn’t think of myself as undesirable. From that moment on, I avoided looking at photographs that depicted me towering over my schoolmates. Later, when my daughter became a tall teenager, I wrote out a list of snappy comebacks like, Yes, I’m over six feet. What’s your problem? Armed with such one-liners, she never complained about her height again. But in the 1950s I had no idea how to react to nasty put-downs about my size. Except to feel humiliated, which is the reaction many people have when their body doesn’t look like the bodies of other people.

Help, I’m in a runaway body was the sensation I experienced as a girl. I sensed without really understanding why that people considered a big female body threatening, and even dangerous.

The poster for the 1958 movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman says it all. She’s a beautiful, long-haired giantess dressed in a skimpy outfit, and she goes on a rampage, plucking cars with shark fins from a highway overpass as if they were toys because she’s taking revenge on an unfaithful husband. The giantess, played by Allison Hayes, can squash men like bugs, and it’s obvious now in a way it wasn’t to me as a girl that she’s a metaphor for the fear that men can feel about women who dare to make demands and take up space.

The giantess in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman dies tragically after the local sheriff fires a shotgun at her, causing a power line transformer to blow up and kill her.

My preteen growth spurt worried my parents. One summer I grew six inches, and by the age of 12 I was 6-foot-2. They took me to a Toronto endocrinologist to see if it could be slowed or stopped. The endocrinologist, who specialized in growth hormones, recommended they do nothing because my growth cycle was almost finished, and my parents agreed. My father had never liked the idea of playing with my physical chemistry anyway.

I barely remember the visit. My parents were careful not to stress my size. Afterward, my mother took me to the tall girls’ shop called Rowena’s, and I hated the dowdy clothes she bought for me that day. I preferred the dresses and pants you could buy from regular clothing stores, even if their outfits looked like they had shrunk in the wash when I put them on. In time, I came to prefer the shrunk look. A blouse that fit me – that is, a blouse with sleeves that came to my wrists – appeared oversized and ungainly to my critical eyes.

At the end of the summer, my parents sent me away to boarding school to avoid the pressures of a co-ed high school, with its popularity contests and habit of calling kids with good marks brown-nosers or sucks. There, I played on all the athletic teams, including basketball. During one match the forward I was guarding broke down and sobbed because she couldn’t score with me blocking her shots.

Were the other girls jealous of my prowess? You must be joking. It was the early sixties. No girl wanted to be my height.

To be tall is to be big and to be big is a cultural no-no for women of all sizes who are taught early on to cede space while men, whose bodies don’t get the same scrutiny, are encouraged to take up as much space as possible.

For instance, as a girl, I was given the smallest bedroom in our Midland, Ont., house. My brother John, who was two years younger and physically smaller then, was given the larger bedroom. I prided myself on accepting the smaller bedroom without complaining, and when, years later, my mother thought it was my turn and offered me the big bedroom, I was too proud to accept. Instead, I huffily declined and said I liked my small bedroom. It’s got a better view and a nicer bed, and besides, it’s mine.

Why is it so easy to give up space when you’re a woman? Because others expect it and we expect it of ourselves? Is that why so many of us work hard at making ourselves small? Will we be like Alice growing too big in the White Rabbit’s house as she sticks an arm out the window and a foot up the chimney and cries in exasperation “I can do no more [...] What will become of me?"

Then, years and years later, in a country house I rented with my brother and my husband, I remember thinking, It’s time for me to have the big bedroom now. It only took me 78 years to feel comfortable saying that to myself.