From The Times

August 28, 2008

Why life is tough as a tall woman

In 1974 Sandy Allen, at 7ft 7in the world's tallest woman, wrote to The Guinness Book of Records, hoping to meet people of similar height. Earlier this month, Allen died, aged 53, having felt lonely all her life. We met some of the Tall Persons Club Great Britain to find out how the world looks from 6ft plus - in heels

Alice Fordham

Tall is beautiful, right? All sorts of good things are tall. The Eiffel Tower, for instance, and sunflowers and giraffes. The ideal man is tall and of course, the world's most desirable women are endless of limb and willowy of mien. Carla Bruni is tall, and not just taller than Nicolas Sarkozy, which most people are, but tall in her own right. Supermodels are mandatorily tall - Lily Cole and Gisele Bündchen are both 5ft 10in.

But there is a point when tallness tips from signifying glamour to looking freaky, and for millions of women, every inch that takes them over six foot is a burden. Because, despite years of feminism, despite endless exhortations to be happy in our skins, the singer Kimya Dawson had it right when she sang that “all girls feel too big sometimes, regardless of their size”. And if every average-sized woman yearns sometimes to be dainty, how does it feel always to be the tallest in the room, to know that a man would need a periscope to look down your top and a stepladder to stroke your hair?

The tallest woman in the world, Sandy Allen (7ft 7in), died earlier this month, and her tributes showed that although tall may be beautiful, very tall is emphatically not very beautiful. People are hard-wired to be surprised at great height, so that, one friend said, they would scream when they saw her, with “that kind of shock where they can't even stop their mouth to think that a human being is going to be the recipient of their reaction.” When Allen contacted The Guinness Book of Records in 1974, she wrote: “It is needless to say my social life is practically nil”.

Allen was an extreme case, but she is far from the only tall woman to find herself defined by her height. It is such a compliment for a woman to be called petite, but if you're over 6ft, just as if you're overweight, it ain't gonna happen.

So they were saying in Chester last weekend, anyway. At the annual Tall Persons Club weekend away, 100 or so people of height gathered in Cheshire for go-karting, city tours and the opportunity to converse without peering down. The women also commiserated with one another.

Over lunch, I ask them what bothers them about being tall. Their grievances tumble forth over mushroom quiche. Dawn, an interior designer, is 6ft 5in and gets in first. “Finding a partner,” she says quietly. Others, not quite hearing her, chip in: “I hate getting on a bus,” says Diane, 6ft 3in, “because there is always one seat left, right at the back, and as you are walking down everyone stares. I feel very self-conscious. And then you have to get into your seat with your knees wrapped around your neck.”

“I've had to buy a Zafira,” says Diane, a gentle Liverpudlian note of indignation creeping in, “for the legroom. It's not my fault that I had to buy it, but I am getting taxed extra on it.” Others pile in: they can't buy cheap clothes in Asda as their friends do (one goes to the Netherlands to get clothes with extra inches), they can't buy women's bikes - very tall men can't get bikes at all - but beyond any practical issue is the social awkwardness of being a tall woman.

“Most of my problems were at school,” Dawn says. “Because you do get picked on, it's just a fact.” And now, she says, at 35: “People make comments when they are standing right next to you - as well as staring. You think, ‘I'm tall, but I'm not deaf'.”

“I still get nasty comments,” Diane says. “Not from children, from adults.” The ultimate social meanness arises when a woman dates a man who is shorter than she is. It is considered demeaning for both parties: the tall woman looks unsexily oversized in comparison with the short man, who is emasculated because he doesn't look like he could club his girlfriend over the head and drag her off to his cave. Celebrities are not immune to the nastiness. Katie Holmes, 5ft 9in, is married to Tom Cruise, at least two inches shorter, and is subjected to much scrutiny, particularly about why she would continue to wear high heels when they emphasise a height difference assumed to be terribly shameful. Sophie Dahl, 5ft 11in, says she is very happy with Jamie Cullum, 5ft 4in, but that didn't stop one wit coining them “James and his Giant Peach”.

Several women at the Tall Club have had boyfriends who are much shorter than they are. Indeed, they say that short men often like very tall women - but the public reaction can be horrible. Although, as Lorna says: “When it comes down to it, it's personalities that matter,” Dawn confesses that when she dated a man nearly a foot shorter than her: “We would hold hands in public, and you feel silly. You shouldn't, but you do.” And Lorna recounts a story of a 5ft 7in boyfriend who would walk behind her, or in front of her, but never alongside.

Lorna eventually married another club member who is nearly 7ft: “I do like being able to look up to him,” she says. Diane says that she met her husband, who is tall, when she was 18. “Don't get me wrong,” she says, “I do love him.” But there is, she says: “a part of me that married him because I didn't think I would find another tall man... so it was a good thing that I did love him”.

“I do think that it's harder to be a tall woman than to be a tall man,” Dawn says, “because for a man it's easier to find a partner.” I speak to Professor Robin Dunbar, a specialist in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, who confirms that life can be tough for tall women.

“Tall men,” he says, “are generally more successful in life, in areas including salary and winning presidential elections. But this doesn't happen for women. The chances of marriage and children are higher for taller men, but the reverse is true for women.”

The difference, Professor Dunbar supposes, lies in the different social strategies of the sexes. “In the playground of life, tall men get used to being deferred to because they can thump hardest. Whereas the women's world is much more collaborative and network-y and physical strength is much less of an advantage.” Indeed, as “fitting in” is so important among girls and women, standing out because of tallness could be a distinct disadvantage.

Plus, he says, tall women are more likely to have uneven features: “Tall men tend to be more symmetrical and have better chances of reproductive success, whereas it is short women who tend to be more symmetrical, to get married and to have children.”

A brisk voice for the positives of tallness is Arianne Cohen, a 6ft 3in New Yorker, who is writing The Tall Book, a hymn to height to be published next year. Cohen stresses the bright sides - it's quite hard to get fat, she says, there is lots of room when you're pregnant and you have a “romantic fanbase” of men who like tall women.

“Tall is gorgeous,” Cohen insists on the phone, “and the moment you perceive yourself that way, other people perceive it too.” She adds that: “I also also think that women blame a lot of their issues on being tall, when that two or three or six inches are not that important. If you were 5ft 8in, you would have all the same problems. It is an easy hole to fall into.”

This seems a hard lesson for the ladies lunching in Chester, lots of whom would probably quite like to have a hole to stand in. Life can be difficult for the tall woman not blessed with confidence and an understanding that unwanted comments are, according to Cohen, “everything to do with people's perceptions of what femininity is”.

That's not to say that the women of the Tall Club don't have a laugh. They submit with the utmost jollity to being photographed getting in and out of phone boxes in the town centre on a busy Saturday. But they certainly get some funny looks, and no one stops to suggest that they become supermodels.

So next time you meet a lady over 6ft, stop to think that whatever humorous remark you make, she'll have heard before. Do not inquire whether she sleeps in a grow-bag, or ask what the air is like up there. In Africa, it's the highest compliment to be called as beautiful as a giraffe. Lots of good things are tall.

Tall Tales - statuesque celebrities

Jerry Hall, the 6ft model and ex-wife of Mick Jagger once said: “Aged 12, I was the tallest in the school, which I didn't like, but I soon learnt that tall is, in fact, an asset: no matter what I put on, it looked good.”

As a young girl, Saffron Burrows was rejected from Grange Hill for being tall. The 6ft actress went on to star in films such as In The Name of The Father. The American tennis star Lindsay Davenport, 6ft 2in, has complained, “It's not easy being my height”. At 6ft 1in, the former US Attorney General Janet Reno once had to take her shoes off at a speech in Florida so that the microphone would pick up her voice.

When the 6ft actress Brigitte Nielsen met Sylvester Stallone, she got a friend to answer the door in case her height scared him off when she got up. She once said: “Men ask me to dance, but when I stand up they start to back off, saying: 'Maybe some other time'. That's when I grab 'em and say: ‘There's no time like here and now, fella'.” At 5ft 10in, Diana, Princess of Wales wore flats to her wedding. The Prince of Wales posed on a box for their official portrait and one step above her at Buckingham Palace in their engagement pictures.