In Nigeria it is normal for a girl as young as six years of age to be “fattened up” before she is married. Traditional African beauty celebrates a woman’s curvy yet voluptuous figure. African beauty was undermined and transformed into being regarded as beastly and savage like. The African female was understood to never being able to capture these qualities. In popular eighteenth century beliefs a woman should be “delicate, pure, and passionless, a bastion of moral and spiritual viture” (Schiebinger ). The African female could never embody true femininity. This justified the belief that slave women could be worked during their pregnancy and still be sent out to the fields to work again a few days after giving birth. As a result this trait type casted African women to have the ability to give birth with ease. Eighteenth century anatomist like Petrus Camper felt that the African pelvis was more spacious and bigger than a European’s woman who was seen to have the ideal built. The pelvis was associated with the procreative qualities and was a measure of “womanliness”. A woman’s feminine beauty was characterized by the redness of her lips, length of her hair, the size of her breasts, her fertility, and ultimately the shape and size of her pelvis. During the late eighteenth century anthropologist compared women of different cultures and their interest was focused on the sexual traits a woman possessed.
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