A Philosophy That Sees ‘Women as Doers'

The Atlantic

04-07-2025

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When a woman's clothes constrict her movement, squeezing her into unforgiving shapes, or her exercise regime is a punishing ordeal meant to winnow her down to the smallest possible size, the result is all too often an alienation from her body. This week, we published two book reviews that offer a different way to think about the physical self—one that replaces an obsession over surface appeal with an emphasis on functionality.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section:
My colleague Julie Beck's essay on Casey Johnston's new ode to weight lifting argues for seeing your body as a working object, rather than an enemy to be subdued; so does Julia Turner's article about Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson's new biography of the fashion designer Claire McCardell. This philosophy might seem, to some, like wishful thinking: Narrow standards of beauty, whether they dictate body size or one's fashion sense, remain powerful in many settings. But Johnston's memoir of her journey toward strength training describes how, as she built muscle, she also began rejecting a deeply ingrained internal voice warning her against gaining a single pound. Beck, who describes trading in punishing turns on the elliptical for lifting, writes that the decision transformed her relationship to her body. As she notes, lifting 'builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics'; strength training has changed the way she walks, erased nagging pains, and allowed her to lift her carry-on into the overhead bin on airplanes with ease.
Fashion, too, has tended to prioritize appearances over practicality—skin-baring cuts when long sleeves might be more appropriate for the weather, high heels that are impossible to walk in—to the detriment of women's well-being. In her essay on Dickinson's Claire McCardell, Turner writes that the designer 'hated being uncomfortable,' and worked to design clothes that people could actually live in. (She is credited with adding pockets to women's clothes and moving hard-to-reach zippers to the sides of dresses.) As Turner argues, McCardell 'saw women as doers, and designed accordingly.' Perhaps, Turner suggests, we should think of fashion less as an art and more as a kind of industrial design: practical and user-friendly, rather than beautiful to look at. Aesthetics aren't irrelevant—style and sartorial creativity can be freeing and self-expressive—but these books refreshingly propose that we value our bodies for what they can do, not how they appear.
The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness
By Julie Beck
Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, considers how weight lifting can help you unlearn diet culture.
What to Read
Be Ready When the Luck Happens, by Ina Garten
A lounge chair beside a pool in Florida, where I was vacationing with my family last winter, was the perfect place to devour Garten's celebration of luxury, good food, and togetherness. This memoir is a record of a life spent prioritizing adventure over prudence, indulgence over temperance. Garten buys a store in a town she's never visited, purchases a beautiful house she can barely afford, and wishes her husband well as he takes a job in Hong Kong while she stays behind. Her brio pays off, of course: That food shop was a success, and she went on to write more than a dozen cookbooks, become a Food Network star, and make pavlova with Taylor Swift. The book is escapist in the way that good, breezy reads often are. It was also, for me, inspiring: Be Ready When the Luck Happens gave me a bit of permission to imagine what I would do if I were the sort of person who embraces possibility the way Garten does. As I basked in the pleasant winter sunshine, I found myself thinking, What if we move to Florida, or to Southern California, or some other place where it's warm in January? I haven't followed through—vacation fantasies have a way of fading as soon as you get back to reality. But I was invigorated by imagining that I might. — Eleanor Barkhorn
Out Next Week
📚 A Marriage at Sea, by Sophie Elmhirst
📚 Becoming Baba, by Aymann Ismail
📚 Bring the House Down, by Charlotte Runcie
Your Weekend Read
The Bad Bunny Video That Captures the Cost of Gentrification
By Valerie Trapp
One of the effects of gentrification, Bad Bunny proposes, is silence. Throughout the DTMF album, Bad Bunny laments how many Puerto Ricans have been forced to leave the island amid financial struggles and environmental disasters such as Hurricane Maria; this is most notable on 'Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,' in which he notes that 'no one here wanted to leave, and those who left dream of returning.' (As of 2018, more Puerto Ricans live outside Puerto Rico than on the island; the same is true of Native Hawaiians and Palestinians in their respective lands.) The DTMF short film makes their absence palpable. 'Did you hear that? That music!' the old man says to Concho, when a red sedan drives by their front porch playing reggaeton (Bad Bunny's 'Eoo'). The old man is moved. 'You barely see that anymore,' he says of the car moseying past. 'I miss hearing the young people hanging out, the motorcycles—the sound of the neighborhood.' Señor and Concho, it seems, live in a community that has turned its volume down, now that most of its Puerto Rican inhabitants have left.