Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue, published in London in 1978, argued that women's compulsive relationships with food, dieting, and body shape were not personal failings but political responses to a patriarchal culture that controlled women through the policing of their bodies. The book connected the long history of bodily constraint — from the corset to calorie counting — into a single feminist narrative of social control. It became an international bestseller and helped establish body image as a central feminist political issue.

Orbach's analysis of the female body as a site of political struggle was closely aligned with the feminist poetics of the period, which was similarly rejecting the ornamental female body of literary tradition. Her work influenced a generation of poets and novelists who engaged with eating, appetite, and bodily shame as feminist subjects. The connection she drew between the corset's physical compression and dieting's social compression became a recurring metaphor in women's creative writing of the 1980s.