The Pad, the ‘Fat’ Belly, and the Politics of Female Appetite

Abstract

1793 saw the emergence, vogue, and decline of ‘the pad’, a fashionable false belly worn by women under their outer garments. At the time, the pad was most explicitly condemned as a disguise for illegitimate pregnancy and as a distorter of the ‘natural’ female shape — the slender waist. However, as this article will uncover, underpinning these more common critiques of the pad was the suspicion that it concealed and imitated the ‘fat’ female belly. Indeed, as I argue, the unsettling effect of the pad was notably due to the way in which it rendered the female wearer's body illegible, particularly to those who wished to police it.