A muscled woman is a scary being. Until recently, visible strength was a sign of ill health or gender disorder and a threat to her femininity and fertility. Of course women’s muscles were rarely visible: her biceps were hidden under voluminous clothing and her abs were constricted by such torture fashion as the corset. Women were not encouraged or generally permitted to do sports or serious exercise. After all, says David L. Chapman in his Introduction, “Popular wisdom decreed that decent women were better off getting their exercise by doing household chores rather than messing about with dumbbells…” In Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women, Chapman at last publishes his photographic collection of tough broads and their gorgeous, bulging connective tissue. The images themselves are simply jaw-droopingly amazing, covering 100 years from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century.
Many of the more than 200 images – some black and white photos, some illustrations, cartoons and color pics – have never been published before. This coffee table sized paperback is so heavy and heaving with astonishing images that one builds one’s own biceps in reading it. While Chapman was busy publishing twelve books on homoerotic male photography and bodybuilding, he couldn’t help but run into these photos of muscular women: circus entertainers, medical freaks, lesbian perverts, dominatrix’s, fantasy objects, butch outlaws, toughies, non-conformists. His collection makes a unique comment on masculinity, femininity, gender construction, body rebellion, social challenge and human beauty. In his overview Introduction, though, Chapman misses one point. He explains that women’s bodybuilding did not take off until the 1970s. “Despite the burgeoning of the Women’s Liberation movement in the late 1960s, many women were afraid to break out of the sexual stereotypes that had been imposed on them by a society dominated by traditionalist men.” Chapman may be right in part, but he is skipping over what it was like in those years to try to get through the door: whether it was the Teamsters union, Wall Street or the weight room.
It took women years of flinging themselves at these barriers before they could break in enough to even get the attention of a trainer. Strong muscular women were a threat to the “natural order” – and still are. The return of nearly obligatory high heels and modern corsets in the form of spanx are a re-imposition of a femininity that limits movement and resists bulk. While there is now a subculture of women’s body-building, the most devoted practitioners are still seen as freaks. Patricia Vertinsky, a professor at the School of Human Kinetics at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia provides a valuable essay on “Muscularity and the Female Body” that contextualizes this remarkable photo collection within feminist theory and history. But words are redundant once one turns the pages to meet Elvira Sansoni (born around 1870) known as “the greatest female Hercules of modern times” or Marta Farra who seemed to lift an elephant in Times Square in 1924. The physical culture magazine covers and the pinups flexing their biceps for the first time in photographic history are amazing. Even the cartoons are mind-blowing. Never has so much physical power been gathered in one welcome package as in this contribution to the literature and vision of women’s reality. ( By David L. Chapman )