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GIRLS LEARN HARD LESSONS EARLY
I was ten years old and Cinderella in a local ballet. As I practiced dancing in my toe shoes and leotards, my instructor impulsively asked me to strike a beauty queen pose. She took a long time to look me over, made several adjustments to how I was standing, and began to shake her head slowly. "Oh, dear, no, you will never win a beauty contest." I didn't understand the implications of her words but I certainly absorbed the disapproval.
"What is wrong with me?"
"Your legs have a gapping hole through them when you put them together. Unless your legs can completely close with no light showing through you can't win beauty pageants."
I was young but my dance instructor's explanation of my 'failure' had already taught me an important lesson in life: Girls are judged by much stricter standards than boys. My brother's physique was never examined for that perfect look. I had just had my first life lesson on the differing standards that apply to girls.
After this experience I became more aware of my body and its need for approval. I spent time in front of the mirror looking for other flaws. At some point I think all young girls must go through the physical rite of checking out their size, waistline, profile and shape, and tally the perceived imperfections.
AS A TEENAGER
As a teenager I was encouraged by my mother to put a little color on my cheeks and lips so that I could look "better." I envied my brother his freedom. He could look the same before he washed his face as after.
As a teenager I was a total failure. The standard look in the 1960s for young women my age was long, blond straight hair. Being totally blond was easy enough but having naturally curly, almost frizzy hair led to drastic measures. I ironed it, soaked it in smelly solutions, and wore the largest rollers I could find to straighten it out. These adventures in conformity led to a section of my hair falling out right before my graduation from high school.
Weighing the same as Twiggy (the standard shape imposed on us at the time by a very young and very skinny British model) could only happen in my imagination. The 90 pound model we were pressured to emulate was my worst nightmare. Somewhere along the line I had been 90 pounds but I would never see it again in this life time.
As I grew older, complying to the standard of beauty became second nature. Every woman learns at an early age that if she wants to be successful in work or romance; make-up, fashion, and shape play a large role in helping her succeed. The message is all around us. We see the ideal image of woman mirrored back at us constantly in magazines, books, movies, on billboards and television. Nobody looks like that - not even the models who want to convince us other wise. The photos are technically manipulated to attain just the right look. Ok, so they don't look like 300 pound gorillas before the photo massaging begins but you get the point; the perfect form and figue is often added on.
THE FEMALE IMAGE
The female image is used to sell anything and everything. Woman's face and form sell products from cigarettes to cars. The Western image of woman is modeled all over the world. I've seen Western looking mannequins in Asia and Africa. That can be a scary experience! Large eyes and high cheek bones are the desired look world wide. If you don't have the look - you can get it through plastic surgery, now a two billion dollar a year industry; one billion of that is cosmetic. The fashion adage that "you can never be too rich or too thin" has led to culturally enforced attitudes equating success and beauty with a thin shape in today's advertising market.
The pursuit of thinness has in turn led to cultural quirks unique to this society of bulemic and anorexic behavior. While millions starve around the world, Americans spend a billion dollars a year on what has now become the corporate industry of dieting. We are the most overweight population on the face of the earth and the most self-obsessed about size and weight. The ethics of spending over 1 billion dollars on diet products when developing nations struggle to feed their populace formulates a cruel test we fail in our self-absorbed culture. Besides, the paradox that we are still the most overweight nation of people on earth. "Food obsessed" comes to mind or is that "junk food obsessed!"
 Feminists today agonize over the injustices women suffer in the work place and question when women will be taken seriously as equals with men in all pursuits. As long as the image of woman is trivialized as an object to sell products, sensationalized in magazines and movies, and corrupted by a power to influence for self-gain, the answer is never.
My own journey of struggling with the conformity to a popular standard of beauty led me to a historical curiosity about the genesis and growth of the fashion industry in this country. I wondered how and when all this hysteria over woman's shape and beauty started.
I began with simple questions:
Has fashion always played such an important part in women's lives?
What was the genesis of the beauty industry in western culture?
How has fashion effected the role and attitudes towards women in each generation? Have women always felt the need to weigh 115 pounds?
Looking at the role of women through the decades of American history one is struck by the fact that the pressure to conform to the standard of beauty was woman's shared and unique experience crossing all economic and class lines through all eras. It has always been the same enforcement of the rules imposed by many different forces all coming together.
FASHION = CULTURAL VIEW OF WOMEN
Fashion has an underside. It is either a reflection or a manipulation of culturally formed beliefs about woman. These beliefs are shaped by social, political and economic issues. Fashion doesn't happen mysteriously. It is part of the whole event happening in culture to women and beliefs about what it means to be woman.
When you read the material from the various eras in this country one begins to understand why and how popular images of women are formed and held by the public. A bird's eye view of history helps to put it all into perspective. When you grasp the overview you can better understand the current-view. It helped me. I hope it helps some of you readers. Besides, you can have a lot of fun with this journey through history while getting the point full face.
MADISON AVENUE RULES
The modern day popularity of romance novels, and their video counterpart, the soap opera, exemplify the powerful influence this myth continually holds over women's attitudes about themselves as objects of beauty. The top magazines on college campuses are typified by Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Both are magazines that reinforce and cultivate the pursuit of beauty as a means for women to attain success. Both magazines hold up a standard of beauty for all women to achieve. When a segment of the teenage female population was polled on who their heroines were the hands down winner were models. The popular image of woman, immortalized in media images, is artificial, deceptive, and a creation of Madison Avenue but its power over women's lives is undeniable.
Contnued Page 2 The Steel Engraved Lady
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