By any reasonable objective view, Christine Craft could never be considered “monstrous” regardless of one’s subjective view of attractiveness. The women who recognize it for the power play it is must inevitably still give in to it just to keep up with the competition who don’t recognize they are being manipulated. By propagandizing the value of attractiveness, it subtly becomes a self-replicating, self-fulfilling prophecy. “Though I may have dismissed intellectually the statement that I was too unattractive, nonetheless in the core of my psyche I felt that something about my face was difficult, if not monstrous, to behold.” Christine CraftĬhristine Craft was a local TV news anchor who was fired-according to her-on the grounds that she was “too old, too unattractive and not deferential to men.” Her overview of the case quoted above, however, reveals the sinister underpinning of how the beauty myth not does, but must work. Or, put another way, the beauty myth exists because of the women’s movement, not in spite of it. So the only means of fighting against that progress was to turn it against itself, undermine its strengths and compromise its weaknesses. The trek toward gender equality had finally reached the point where there was no going back progress was inevitable. The beauty myth is a constructed response to the losses endured by the patriarchy resulting from the feminist movement and the demand for equal rights for women. The opening lines of the book subtly situate the thesis. In the two decades of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s, Western women gained legal and reproductive rights, pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role.

We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.Īt last, after a long silence, women took to the streets. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

The beauty myth sparknotes