social writing: Tiktok — “Tall Girl Therapy”

Objective: Promote + repurpose an audio podcast about tall women and gendered height preferences into front-facing video content.

Script: “Tall Girl Therapy”

Americans hit a major growth spurt in the first half of the 20th century - 
Which was a positive indicator for public health but a major red flag for the inevitable tall girls. 

Back in the 1950s, girls standing over 5’6” were in the danger zone, and white middle-class parents were freaked out about these freaks. 

Mid-century parenting magazines were all over it with warnings like: “Tallness can be a real handicap for a girl.

She may find release in athletics, and in this way make up for the fact that she lacks the ability to be NORMALLY FEMININE.”

By the 1960s, “tall girl therapy” or “height-reduction therapy” was a relatively uncontroversial medical practice. 

Pediatric endocrinologists treated otherwise healthy but tall girls on high doses of synthetic estrogen to literally stunt their growth. 

And by high doses, I mean astronomical. 

Some were prescribing 100 times the estrogen you’d find in an estrogen-based birth control today. 

Doctors treated a social stigma as a medical problem that gave girls low esteem and biologically destined them to spinsterhood and/or lesbianism. 

As one height-concerned mother put to the New York Times in 1976: 

“I don’t want a basketball player for a daughter. I want a normal girl.” 

She’d started her daughter on “tall girl therapy” at 10 and took her off of it a couple years later once her daughter had reached what the parents believed to be the “perfect” height of 5-6. 

Unfortunately, the daughter was interested in modeling and worried she’d be too short to make the cut. 

Meanwhile, another camp of doctors was like, this….seems like malpractice? Oh, and all that synthetic estrogen? Yeah, maybe not the best idea!

Treating healthy tall girls for “height reduction” to make them more marriageable pretty much faded out by the 1980s. 

But those blue and pink boxes of tall boy - short girl? 

They’re very much still around. 

Just ask the nearest straight couple where the woman is taller…if you can find one! 

Caption: Ever heard of #tallgirl therapy? (yes, that’s what docs back in the day called it)