the beauty myth vintage feminism short edition

The initial edition of The Beauty Mythbenefited from a lot of good fortune. It seemed clear to me that that dynamic was what was involved with the ever-more-unattainable, ever-thinner, ever-more-surgically-enhanced quality of the images of perfection that bombarded women’s sensibilities in every direction – now that women had the chance of being really free.

And then, I saw, in every generation that had seen such an awakening, the next generation was told to go home – it was ‘post-feminism’ time – the battles had all been won.

Since I had been fortunate enough to have studied feminist history, I realised that in every generation in which there was a great push forward by women, some ideal arose to colonise their energies and thus make sure that they did not get too far. I saw that the epidemic of eating disorders on my own college campus as an undergraduate, and on college campuses throughout the world, and throughout the West, indeed, was a political sedative. Apart from the physical toll that this took, I saw the toll that these fixations took upon their ability to feel free inside their own minds – to explore themselves and their world – to fight their own battles. The young women around me, who should have been the brightest, most ambitious and most effective young women ever to inhabit the planet – as they inherited the gains and analysis of feminism – were often trapped in a desperate cycle of starving themselves compulsively, or compulsively exercising, or binging and purging. Though my peers no longer cared much about maintaining the perfect household – the ideal of femininity against which our mother’s generation had rebelled – they were obsessed with another kind of perfection: physical perfection, as measured against fashion models and film stars. I knew from looking at my own young peers – I was twenty-six when the book was written – that indeed the battles had not been won – but that many of them had become internalised. News outlets repeated continually that young women rejected feminism and that ‘the battles had all been won’, as the cliché went. Middle-class Western women, anyway, were focused on getting into the workplace, not on social revolution the issues of working-class and poor women were far from central. Many media outlets had proclaimed that feminism – the feminism of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, of NOW, was dead. When I wrote The Beauty Myth in 1991, I felt I was writing, to some extent, into a vacuum. To start us off, Naomi Wolf, author of the iconic The Beauty Myth, introduces the new Vintage Feminism Short Edition, which distils the essence of this ground-breaking tract. We’re into Week 3 of Women on the Page, in which we focus on Authors: Now – those writing in the last twenty years or so.

The beauty myth vintage feminism short edition