What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Read 'What Are Big Girls Made Of?' by 'Marge Piercy' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
What Are Big Girls Made Of? by Marge Piercy
The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
She is manufactured like a sports sedan.
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade.
Cecile had been seduction itself in college.
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,
her hips and ass promising, her mouth pursed
in the dark red lipstick of desire.
She visited in '68 still wearing skirts
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick,
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt,
lipstick pale as apricot milk,
hair loose as a horse's mane. Oh dear,
I thought in my superiority of the moment,
whatever has happened to poor Cecile?
She was out of fashion, out of the game,
disqualified, disdained, dis-
membered from the club of desire.
Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th century:
century of the ultimate lady
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting.
Paniers bring her hips out three feet
each way, while the waist is pinched
and the belly flattened under wood.
The breasts are stuffed up and out
offered like apples in a bowl.
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper
never meant for walking.
On top is a grandiose headache:
hair like a museum piece, daily
ornamented with ribbons, vases,
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy
of a hairdresser turned loose.
The hats were rococo wedding cakes
that would dim the Las Vegas strip.
Here is a woman forced into shape
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:
a woman made of pain.
How superior we are now: see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors.
She runs on a treadmill every morning,
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt,
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles,
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food
hungry, always hungry:
a woman made of pain.
A cat or dog approaches another,
they sniff noses. They sniff asses.
They bristle or lick. They fall
in love as often as we do,
as passionately. But they fall
in love or lust with furry flesh,
not hoop skirts or push up bras
rib removal or liposuction.
It is not for male or female dogs
that poodles are clipped
to topiary hedges.
If only we could like each other raw.
If only we could love ourselves
like healthy babies burbling in our arms.
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed
to need what is sold us.
Why should we want to live inside ads?
Why should we want to scourge our softness
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting?
Why should we punish each other with scorn
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?
When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?
What Are Big Girls Made Of? Summary and Analysis
Marge Piercy stages the poem as a sharp argument about how womanhood is repeatedly manufactured by culture rather than simply lived in the body. She begins by rejecting the idea that a woman is defined by flesh alone, then moves through a series of vivid examples: a former college beauty who has fallen out of style, the tightly controlled fashions of the eighteenth century, and the punishing self-discipline demanded by modern fitness and beauty culture. Each era presents a different version of femininity, but all of them turn the body into something shaped, corrected, displayed, and judged.
The poem's central movement is from observation to accusation to plea. Piercy shows how desire, fashion, and consumerism train women to treat themselves as projects that must be improved, restrained, or sold back to them in another form. The repeated phrase about a woman being made of pain gives the poem its emotional spine: no matter how glamorous the surface, the result is suffering, self-surveillance, and loss of ease. The ending turns outward toward a more humane possibility, imagining a world where women might value their bodies without shame and desire each other, and themselves, without the machinery of approval and correction.
Tone in What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Piercy's tone is wry, critical, and increasingly urgent. She sounds amused by the absurdity of beauty culture at first, but that amusement sharpens into indignation as she exposes how thoroughly women are pressed into unnatural shapes. The mood for the reader is a mix of recognition, discomfort, and resistance: the poem invites laughter at the spectacle of fashion, then leaves a lingering sense of anger at how deeply those spectacles wound self-image.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in What Are Big Girls Made Of?
- Body as social construction - The poem insists that femininity is shaped by fashion, advertising, and cultural expectation rather than by any stable or natural essence.
- Beauty as discipline - Whether through corsets, dieting, exercise, or cosmetic pressure, the female body is shown as something trained and managed under stress.
- Objectification and performance - Women are repeatedly treated as visible surfaces meant to attract judgment, rather than as full human beings with their own desires.
- Consumer culture - The poem connects bodily dissatisfaction to a market that sells women endless tools for changing themselves.
- Female solidarity and self-acceptance - The closing wishes for mutual liking and self-love suggest a hope beyond competition and scorn.
- Pain beneath appearance - Glamour, elegance, and slimness all hide physical and emotional suffering in the poem's vision.
Literary Devices in What Are Big Girls Made Of?
- Extended metaphor - The poem compares women's bodies to manufactured objects, machines, and projects, making social pressure feel mechanical and invasive.
- Imagery - Strong visual details such as lipstick, corsets, and exercise equipment create a vivid sense of bodies being shaped and displayed.
- Repetition - The repeated phrase about a woman being made of pain emphasizes the poem's argument and gives it an incantatory force.
- Rhetorical questions - The closing questions challenge readers to examine the assumptions behind beauty standards and bodily shame.
- Irony - Claims of progress or superiority are undercut by the fact that each era imposes a different but equally harsh standard.
- Cataloging - Lists of body parts, clothing, and decorative objects build pressure and suggest the endless accumulation of demands placed on women.
- Allusion - References to art and fashion history widen the poem's scope, showing that the policing of women's bodies is longstanding.
- Contrast - The poem sets natural flesh against artificial shaping, exposing the gap between lived bodies and idealized images.
Symbolism in What Are Big Girls Made Of?
- Sports sedan - This image symbolizes the mechanized, redesigned way culture treats the female body, as if it were a product to be upgraded.
- Corset - The corset represents restraint, control, and the historical pressure to make femininity physically restrictive.
- Mini skirt - It suggests changing fashion standards and the way women can be made desirable or outdated by trend.
- Mirrorless ideal body - The imagined body that never wrinkles or fades symbolizes an impossible standard of permanent perfection.
- Treadmill and weights - These modern exercise machines symbolize self-discipline turned into a form of punishment.
- Dogs sniffing each other - The animals suggest a more direct, unselfconscious kind of attraction that contrasts with human stylization.
- Ads - Advertising symbolizes the force that teaches people to distrust their own bodies and desire manufactured ideals.
- Mondrian painting - The reference symbolizes severe abstraction and straight lines, reflecting how the body is forced into rigid design.
Historical Context of What Are Big Girls Made Of?
The poem belongs to a long tradition of feminist writing that questions how culture scripts women's bodies for public approval. Its concern with cosmetics, fashion, dieting, and advertising reflects late twentieth-century debates about consumerism and the commercialization of femininity, when second-wave feminist poets and essayists often challenged the idea that beauty norms were harmless or purely personal.
By moving from eighteenth-century fashion to modern exercise culture, the poem also places changing styles within a broader historical pattern: the details shift, but the demand that women reshape themselves persists. That wider perspective connects the poem to feminist critiques of art, advertising, and popular media across modern literary history.
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