Gloria Steinem: In Praise of Women's Bodies

On her experience of a week-long women's spa retreat.

“Gradually there was also less embarrassment about appendectomy scars, streth marks, Cesarean incisions, and the like. Though I had always resented the anthropological double standard by which scars are supposed to be marks of courage on a male body but marks of ugliness on a female one, I began to realize that I had been assessing such wounds in masculine terms nonetheless. Dueling scars, war wounds, scars-as-violence – those images were part of the reason I had assumed such marks to be shocking on men as well as on women.
But many of women’s body scars have a very different context and thus an emotional power all their own. Stretch marks and Cesarean incisions from giving birth are very different from accident, war, and fight scars. They evoke courage without violence, strength without cruelty, and even so, they’re far more likely to be worn with diffidence than bragging. That gives them a moving, bittersweet power, like seeing a room where a very emotional event in our lives once took place.
There were other surgical scars that seemed awesome to me, too, but not as evocative as those from childbirth. How do women survive even the routine physical price of skin stretch to its limit? After one Cesarean birth, where do some women find the courage to attempt several more?
True, there are tribal societies that treat women who give birth like honorary male warriors, that is paying too much honor to war. Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense and as courageous as either one. Yet one of the strongest, most thoughtful feminists I know still hides in one-piece bathing suits to conceal her two Cesarean scars. And one of the most hypocritical feminists I know (that is, one who loves feminism but dislikes women) had plastic surgery to remove the tiny scar that gave her face character.
Perhaps we’ll only be fully at ease with ourselves when we can appreciate scars as symbols of experience, often experiences that other women share, and see our bodies as unique chapters in a shared story.
To do that, we need to be together unself-consciously. We need the regular sight of our diverse reality to wear away the plastic-stereotypical-perfect image against which we’ve been encouraged to measure our selves. The impossible goal of “what we should look like” has worn a groove in our brains. It will take the constant intimacy of many new images to blast us out.” (163). Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1983).