Women’s writing, on the other hand, turns the myth on its head. Female culture’s greatest writers share the search for radiance, a beauty that has meaning. The battle between the overvalued beauty and the undervalued, unglamorous but animated heroine forms the spine of the women’s novel. It extends from Jane Eyre to today’s paperback romances, in which the gorgeous nasty rival has a mane of curls and a prodigious cleavage, but the heroine only her spirited eyes. The hero’s capacity to see the true beauty of the heroine is his central test.
This tradition pits beautiful, vapid Jane Fairfax (“I cannot separate Miss Fairfax from her complexion”) against the subtler Emma Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s Emma; frivolous, blond Rosamond Vincy (“What is the use of being exquisite if you are not seen by the best judges?”) against “nun-like” Dorothea Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; manipulative, “remarkably pretty” Isabella Crawford against self-effacing Fanny Price in Austen’s Mansfield Park; fashionable, soulless Isabella Thorpe against Catherine Morland, unsure of herself “where the beauty of her own sex is concerned,” in Austen’s Northanger Abbey; narcissistic Ginevra Fanshawe (“How do I look to-night? . . . I know I am beautiful”) against the invisible Lucy Snow (“I saw myself in the glass . . . I thought little of the wan spectacle”) in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; and, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, vain Amy March, “a graceful statue,” against tomboyish Jo, who sells her “one beauty,” her hair, to help her family. It descends to the present in the novels of Alison Lurie, Fay Weldon, Anita Brookner. Women’s writing is full to the point of heartbreak with the injustices done by beauty—its presence as well as its absence.
But when girls read the books of masculine culture, the myth subverts what those stories seem to say. Tales taught to children as parables for proper values become meaningless for girls as the myth begins its work. Take the story of Prometheus, which appears in Sullivan Reader comic-book form for third grade American children. To a child being socialized into Western culture, it teaches that a great man risks all for intellectual daring, for progress and for the public good. But as a future woman, the little girl learns that the most beautiful woman in the world was man-made, and that her intellectual daring brought the first sickness and death onto men. The myth makes a reading girl skeptical of the moral coherence of her culture’s stories.
As she grows up, her double vision intensifies: If she reads James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, she is not meant to question why Stephen Dedalus is the hero of his story. But in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles—why did the light of description fall on her, and not on any other of the healthy, untutored Wessex farm girls dancing in circles that May morning? She was seen and found beautiful, so things happened to her—riches, indigence, prostitution, true love, and hanging. Her life, to say the least, became interesting, while the hard-handed threshing girls around her, her friends, not blessed or cursed with her beauty, stayed in the muddy provinces to carry on the agricultural drudgery that is not the stuff of novels. Stephen is in his story because he’s an exceptional subject who must and will be known. But Tess? Without her beauty, she’d have been left out of the sweep and horror of large events. A girl learns that stories happen to “beautiful” women, whether they are interesting or not. And, interesting or not, stories do not happen to women who are not “beautiful.”
Her early education in the myth makes her susceptible to the heroines of adult women’s mass culture—the models in women’s magazines. It is those models whom women usually mention first when they think about the myth.
Women’s Magazines
Most commentators, like this Private Eye satirist, ridicule women’s magazines’ “trivial” concerns and their editorial tone: “Women’s magazine triteness . . . combines knowing chatter about blowjobs with deep reservoirs of sentimentality.” Women too believe that they transmit the worst aspects of the beauty myth. Readers themselves are often ambivalent about the pleasure mixed up with anxiety that they provide. “I buy them,” a young woman told me, “as a form of self-abuse. They give me a weird mixture of anticipation and dread, a sort of stirred-up euphoria. Yes! Wow! I can be better starting from right this minute! Look at her! Look at her! But right afterward, I feel like throwing out all my clothes and everything in my refrigerator and telling my boyfriend never to call me again and blowtorching my whole life. I’m ashamed to admit that I read them every month.”
Women’s magazines accompanied women’s advances and the simultaneous evolution of the beauty myth. During the 1860s and 1870s, Girton and Newnham Colleges, Vassar and Radcliffe, and other institutions of higher education for women were founded, and, as historian Peter Gay writes, “women’s emancipation was getting out of control.” Meanwhile, the mass production of beauty images aimed at women was perfected, and The Queen and Harper’s Bazaar were established; the circulation of Beeton’s English Women’s Domestic Magazine doubled to fifty thousand. The rise in women’s magazines was brought about by large investments of capital combined with increased literacy and purchasing power of lower-middle- and working-class women: The democratization of beauty had begun.
Magazines first took advertisers at the turn of the century. As suffragists were chaining themselves to the gates of the White House and of Parliament, the circulation of women’s magazines doubled again. By the teens, the era of the New Woman, their style had settled into what it is today: cozy, relaxed, and intimate.
The magazines, other writers have shown, reflect shifts in women’s status: Victorian magazines “catered to a female sex virtually in domestic bondage,” but with World War I and women’s participation in it, they “quickly developed a commensurate degree of social awareness.” When the male work force came back from the trenches, the magazines returned to the home. Again in the 1940s they glamorized the world of war-production paid work and war-effort volunteer work. “The press cooperated,” writes John Costello in Love, Sex and War, 1939–1945, when “the War Manpower Commission turned to . . . Madison Avenue to boost its national campaign to attract first-time women workers.” Glamour, he claims, was a main tool in the enlistment campaign then, just as the beauty myth today serves government and the economy.
As women responded and undertook men’s higher-paid work, a new sense of competence and confidence emboldened them. At the same time, writes Costello, advertisements “attempted to preserve the socially acceptable feminine image of women war workers.” A Pond’s cold cream ad of the time read: “We like to feel we look feminine even though we are doing a man-sized job . . . so we tuck flowers and ribbons in our hair and try to keep our faces looking pretty as you please.” Costello quotes a cosmetics company’s advertisement that admitted that while the war could not be won by lipstick, “it symbolizes one of the reasons why we are fighting . . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely.” In the face of a great social upheaval that was giving women responsibility, autonomy, state-run child care, and good money, the advertisers needed to ensure that there would be a market left for their products. Costello notes that “it was not just the advertisements . . . magazine articles focused the ladies’ attention on the need to keep their FQ (Feminine Quotient) high.” The magazines needed to ensure that their readers would not liberate themselves out of their interest in women’s magazines.
When the men were demobilized, Western economies faced a crisis. In the United States, the government needed “to counter fears that American soldiers would return to an employment market saturated by women.” To its dismay, the Manpower Commission realized that they had been wrong in their hopes that they could exploit women’s labor as a stopgap: “Behind the scenes, male-dominated bureaucracies were casting post-war plans on the assumption that most of the women would meekly return to their ageless mission as wives and mothers. But they were wrong.” Very wrong: In fact, 61 to 85 percent of women, a 1944 survey found, “certainly did not want to go back to housework after the war.” What the commission saw in that decided respons
e from working women was the threat of returned veterans thrown out of work in favor of lower-paid female workers, which would lead to political unrest, even a repeat of the Depression. The year after the war ended, the magazines swung again—more exaggeratedly than before—back into domesticity, and three million American and one million British women were fired or quit their jobs.
Though many writers have pointed out that women’s magazines reflect historical change, fewer examine how part of their job is to determine historical change as well. Editors do their jobs well by reading the Zeitgeist; editors of women’s magazines—and, increasingly, mainstream media as well—must be alert to what social roles are demanded of women to serve the interests of those who sponsor their publication. Women’s magazines for over a century have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women’s roles, and throughout that time—today more than ever—they have consistently glamorized whatever the economy, their advertisers, and, during wartime, the government, needed at that moment from women.
By the 1950s, the traditional women’s magazine’s role was re-established: “In psychological terms,” writes Ann Oakley in Housewife, “they enabled the harassed mother, the overburdened housewife, to make contact with her ideal self: that self which aspires to be a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient homemaker. . . . Women’s expected role in society [was] to strive after perfection in all three roles.” The definition of perfection, however, changes with the needs of employers, politicians, and, in the postwar economy that depended on spiraling consumption, advertisers.
In the 1950s, advertising revenues soared, shifting the balance between editorial and advertising departments. Women’s magazines became of interest to “the companies that, with the war about to end, were going to have to make consumer sales take the place of war contracts.” The main advertisers in the women’s magazines responsible for the Feminine Mystique were seeking to sell household products.
In a chapter of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique entitled “The Sexual Sell,” she traced how American housewives’ “lack of identity” and “lack of purpose . . . [are] manipulated into dollars.” She explored a marketing service and found that, of the three categories of women, the Career Woman was “unhealthy” from the advertisers’ point of view, and “that it would be to their advantage not to let this group get any larger. . . . they are not the ideal type of customer. They are too critical.”
The marketers’ reports described how to manipulate housewives into becoming insecure consumers of household products: “A transfer of guilt must be achieved,” they said. “Capitalize . . . on ‘guilt over hidden dirt.’” Stress the “therapeutic value” of baking, they suggested: “With X mix in the home, you will be a different woman.” They urged giving the housewife “a sense of achievement” to compensate her for a task that was “endless” and “time-consuming.” Give her, they urged manufacturers, “specialized products for specialized tasks”; and “make housework a matter of knowledge and skill, rather than a matter of brawn and dull, unremitting effort.” Identify your products with “spiritual rewards,” an “almost religious feeling,” “an almost religious belief.” For objects with “added psychological value,” the report concluded, “the price itself hardly matters.” Modern advertisers are selling diet products and “specialized” cosmetics and antiaging creams rather than household goods. In 1989, “toiletries/cosmetics” ad revenue offered $650 million to the magazines, while “soaps, cleansers, and polishes” yielded only one tenth that amount. So modern women’s magazines now center on beauty work rather than housework: You can easily substitute in the above quotes from the 1950s all the appropriate modern counterparts from the beauty myth.
If the ads and commercials are a “clear case of caveat emptor,” Friedan concluded,
the same sexual sell disguised in the editorial content is both less ridiculous and more insidious. . . . A memo need never be written, a sentence need never be spoken at an editorial conference; the men and women who make the editorial decisions often compromise their very own high standards in the interest of the advertising dollar.
That is still true.
Nothing structural has changed except the details of the dream. Betty Friedan asked:
Why is it never said that the really crucial function . . . that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house? . . . Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives. . . . It would take a pretty clever economist to figure out what would keep our affluent economy going if the housewife market began to fall off.
When the restless, isolated, bored, and insecure housewife fled the Feminine Mystique for the workplace, advertisers faced the loss of their primary consumer. How to make sure that busy, stimulated working women would keep consuming at the levels they had done when they had all day to do so and little else of interest to occupy them? A new ideology was necessary that would compel the same insecure consumerism; that ideology must be, unlike that of the Feminine Mystique, a briefcase-sized neurosis that the working woman could take with her to the office. To paraphrase Friedan, why is it never said that the really crucial function that women serve as aspiring beauties is to buy more things for the body? Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that they will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring “beauties.”
“Clever economists” did figure out what would keep our affluent economy going once the housewife market began to fall off after the second wave of women’s advancement sparked by Friedan’s book: The modern form of the beauty myth was figured out, with its $33-billion thinness industry and its $20-billion youth industry.
In the breakdown of the Feminine Mystique and the rebirth of the women’s movement, the magazines and advertisers of that defunct religion were confronted with their own obsolescence. The beauty myth, in its modern form, arose to take the place of the Feminine Mystique, to save magazines and advertisers from the economic fallout of the women’s revolution.
The beauty myth simply took over the function of Friedan’s “religion” of domesticity. The terms have changed but the effect is the same. Of the women’s culture of the 1950s, Friedan lamented that “there is no other way for a woman to be a heroine” than to “keep on having babies”; today, a heroine must “keep on being beautiful.”
The women’s movement nearly succeeded in toppling the economics of the magazines’ version of femininity. During its second wave, clothing manufacturers were alarmed to find that women weren’t spending much money on clothing anymore. As middle-class women abandoned their role as consuming housewives and entered the work force, their engagement with the issues of the outer world could foreseeably lead them to lose interest altogether in women’s magazines’ separate feminine reality. And the magazines’ authority was undermined still further with the fashion upheavals that began in the late 1960s, the end of haute couture and the beginning of what fashion historians Elizabeth Wilson and Lou Taylor call “style for all.” Would liberated women read women’s magazines? What for? Indeed, between 1965 and 1981, British women’s magazine sales fell sharply from 555.3 million to 407.4 million copies a year. The magazines’ editors and publishers could foresee their traditional hold on women being loosened by the winds of social change.
High-fashion culture ended, and the women’s magazines’ traditional expertise was suddenly irrelevant. The Feminine Mystique evaporated; all that was left was the body. With the rebirth of the women’s movement, Vogue in 1969 offered up—hopefully, perhaps desperately—the Nude Look. Women’s sense of liberation from the older constraints of fashion was countered by a new and sinister relationship to their bodies, as, writes historian Roberta Pollack Seid, “Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles.” Stripped of
their old expertise, purpose, and advertising hook, the magazines invented—almost completely artificially—a new one. In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a “problem” where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on women’s natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma. The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972. Articles on dieting in the popular press soared from 60 in the year 1979 to 66 in the month of January 1980 alone. By 1983–84, the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature listed 103 articles; by 1984, 300 diet books were on the shelves. The lucrative “transfer of guilt” was resurrected just in time.
That “transfer of guilt” that rescued the women’s magazines gained power from the caricature in the mainstream media of the heroines of the reborn women’s movement, a caricature that had been done to death for over a century, always in service of the same kind of backlash; the 1848 Seneca Falls convention for a female Bill of Rights provoked editorials about “‘unsexed women,’” writes Gay, which insinuated that they had become activists because “they were too repulsive to find a husband. . . . These women are entirely devoid of personal attractions.” Another antifeminist publicist he quoted characterized them as a “hybrid species, half man and half woman, belonging to neither sex.” When a supporter, Senator Lane of Kansas, presented a petition for the franchise on behalf of “one hundred and twenty-four beautiful, intelligent and accomplished ladies,” another editorial protested that “that trick . . . will not do. We wager an apple that the ladies referred to are not ‘beautiful’ or accomplished. Nine out of ten of them are undoubtedly passé. They have hook-billed noses, crow’s feet under their sunken eyes. . . .” A doctor reacting to feminist agitation characterized such “degenerate women” by “their low voices, hirsute bodies, and small breasts.” According to Gay, “Feminists were denigrated as failed women, half-men, hens that crow . . . humor magazines and hostile legislators everywhere broadcast a frightening picture of appalling masculine harridans haranguing the House of Commons.”