History of BBWorld Part V

It is important to recognize that although weight tiers were in place across most countries in various forms, the vast majority of women fell into the commoner tier, and the vast majority of them never even approached the upper bound of said tier. Contemporary records and archaeological evidence indicate that the average woman in 1600 stood 5’2” and weighed 160 lbs; though this was a significant improvement from the preceding medieval period, it was far outstripped by even the lower-tier nobility, which at this point commonly saw their women exceed 300 lbs. This longstanding and ever more extreme class division began to sow unrest throughout the 1600s and was further exacerbated by the ascension of Christina of Sweden.

Christina began her rule of the Swedish Empire in earnest in 1644. The 18-year-old was unconventional in quite a few aspects; she dressed in a more masculine style than her contemporary female rulers, and she maintained a rather low weight for a noblewoman of the time (peaking at 292 lbs near the end of her reign). Furthermore, as a scholar and patron of both artists and scientists alike, she would make Stockholm a hub of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution to a degree not seen elsewhere throughout Europe. Her cultivation of this bastion of free thinking led her to adopt a series of novel policies, some with more success than others; one of the most notable is her 1652 decree abolishing the class-based weight tiers of her country. She argued for a form of meritocracy- i.e., if a woman (or her family) had the means to maintain herself at a size exceeding the historical standards for her class, she should be allowed to do so rather than being restricted by the arbitrary borderlines into which she was born. It is believed that Christina’s own low weight was meant as a reassuring example to women of her realm of the newly severed bounds between weight and class; namely, if an abnormally light queen can exist, abnormally heavy women of the peasantry could exist as well. Additionally, though Christina would never formally organize a procedure for promotion to a higher class, she personally elevated a significant number of her subjects to nobility; the fact that many of her handpicked nobles were among the heaviest members of their previous class did not go unnoticed, setting up a secondary implication of the meritocracy. Specifically, if a woman’s family could generate enough wealth to maintain her larger size, they were likely to be rewarded with an elevation in class.

Though Christina abdicated in 1654 after a series of poor financial decisions, and though further elevations in class were not continued by subsequent rulers, the idea of dismantling class-based weight tiers began to disseminate through Europe and slowly to the world as a whole. The established nobility obviously opposed these notions, but seeds were being planted in the minds of common folk which would soon begin to bear fruit. The first of the major empires to have its weight tiers abolished was England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688; as part of the zeal resulting from the establishment of what would become modern parliamentary democracy, Mary II and William III permitted the abolishment to be included in the Bill of Rights 1689 passed by the parliament of England. Other states would require additional impetus to conduct such abolishments, but they were likely to soon find them as a consequence of the developments in the competition for WHW.