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the impact of modern beauty standards on women
media's impact on women
social norms of women beauty
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Recommended: the impact of modern beauty standards on women
Not long ago, a woman’s success was measured by the success of her husband and her domestic prowess. Today, a woman is presumed successful if she can emulate the standards of beauty portrayed in the media. Unfortunately, this subliminally enforced standard is unattainable to some women, regardless of the quality of their character. Let’s examine how western women went from being pioneering superheroes, to people who measure their worth against airbrushed photographs of impossibly beautiful women.
Timeline of American Beauty
People have used women in print media to sell their products since the mid-19th century. The women in the ads were portrayed with thin waists, large breasts and stylish clothing. As the roaring 1920’s moved in, American women scored voting rights and birth control. Due to World War I, it became necessary for women to work. The print world began to portray women in a boyish, sexy fashion. Hemlines rose for sex appeal. Breasts were bound so women didn’t appear too feminine in the work-place. Hair was cut shorter for convenience and the flapper-girl was born.
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Early on in the 20s woman began to change both in actions and appearance; they had short hair, had dresses showing ankles,began smoking and drinking in public. There was an uproar, especially from the conservative woman. Up until this time women were portrayed as perfect home makers that only cared for the home, their children and their husbands. But the era changed and with it the style too, the 1920s brought along a new desired fashion, the flapper. Flappers were portrayed as rebellious youth who had short hair, flashy clothes, bold make-up and listened to jazz. While many women of the 1920s were not flappers, the fashion did catch on, therefore the “scanda...
From coast to coast people were reading the exploits of a new type of woman called flapper. Prior to World War 1 Victorian ideals still dictated the behavior of American women and girls. Frederick Lewis Allen describes the traditional role of women. Women were the guardians of morality. They were made of finer stuff than men. They were expected to act accordingly. Young girls must look forward in innocence to a romantic love match which would lead them to the altar and to living happily ever after. Until the right man came along they must allow no male to kiss them. Flappers did the opposite. Flappers danced the Charleston, kissed their boyfriends while they played golf and sat behind the wheels of fast cars. The liberated usually young female disdained the traditions of her mother and grandmother before her. Flappers would smoke and drink alcohol, she cut her hair and wore short dresses. They also changed their views on courtship rituals, marriage, and child rearing. With these they could have the same freedom as men could. The time period also saw a highly physical change in women’s lives like how they dressed and looked. For the first time in American history women could choose to be free from long hair and voluminous clothing. Before the women changed they wore very restrictive clothing consisting of long skirts with layers of petticoats over tightly laced corsets that produced an hourglass figure with wide hips and a narrow waist.
Katharina Linder. 2004. “Images of Women in General Interest and Fashion Magazine Advertisements from 1955 to 2002.” Sex Roles 51:409-421.
In the generation leading up to the emergence of the flapper, the popular style for women was that of the “Gibson Girl”. Based on the depictions of women by...
As the 1920’s began, the liberation of women by the introduction of new rights gave them newly found confidence to move to cities, become independent or live with other women, and experience life in a new way. This introduced the Flapper era, when women broke social normality’s and became less lady like. Without having to live by the rules, women could experiment more with makeup, dancing, and clothing, all ways of expressing themselves, as opposed to prior to the 1920’s when expectations of women’s appearances and behavior were high. This increasingly expressive woman became the cool girl. A woman who was “always utterly un-self-conscious and perfectly indifferent and unaware of anyone’s interest in her” and who allowed life to come easy was the cool, calm and collected girl most people would
In the early twentieth century, women were expected to dress modestly at all times and were predestined to be housewives. Once men were drafted into World War I, women needed a distraction such as working and providing for themselves and a way to show that they are just as strong alone and don’t need men to make decisions for them. Eventually a new breed of women emerged from society. Women that wore bobbed hair, short skirts, flamboyant dresses and had an enjoyment of jazz were considered to be “flapper”. The flapper was an in-between of adulthood and pure immaturity (NYU) . Flappers were daring, empowering and courageous. This group of women were determined to let society know that they were on a mission to steer society from the cultural norm. They believed women were just as powerful as men were and would use their voice, actions and even appearance to prove this theory. The Flapper went from being just a look to the beginning of a feminist awakening.
Media is a wide term that covers many information sources including, television, movies, advertisement, books, magazines, and the internet. It is from this wide variety of information that women receive cues about how they should look. The accepted body shape and has been an issue affecting the population probably since the invention of mirrors but the invention of mass media spread it even further. Advertisements have been a particularly potent media influence on women’s body image, which is the subjective idea of one's own physical appearance established by observation and by noting the reactions of others. In the case of media, it acts as a super peer that reflects the ideals of a whole society. Think of all the corsets, girdles, cosmetics, hair straighteners, hair curlers, weight gain pills, and diet pills that have been marketed over the years. The attack on the female form is a marketing technique for certain industries. According to Sharlene Nag...
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow, 1991.
When one thinks of flappers, the first thing that comes to mind is the image of a woman dressed much like Julie Andrews in Thoroughly Modern Millie, bobbed hair, fringed low-waisted dress, flat-chested and highly made up face. This, though a stereotype is close to the truth. In the 20’s after the first world war women’s roles in society began to change, primarily because they started becoming more independent – both in their dress and action. They started to defy what was considered to be appropriate feminine behavior and along with those actions came new fashions. The sleek, boyish look became popular and women began to wear lower waistlines, higher hemlines, sleeveless dresses that showed off their arms, long strands of pearls and rolled down pantyhose to show their knees. Women who had larger breasts even went so far as to bind them down to fit into the flat-chested ideal of beauty. The “in” look now was boyish, much in contrast to the feminine big skirted, shirtwaisted dresses of their mothers’ age. Women began to gain the independence and social liberties that men had always possessed, they wanted to physically display their newly gained freedoms. Short hair, first as a bob, later as a slicked down “shingle” that curled above the ears emphasized the new androgynous look women were trying to obtain. These “modern” women asserted their independence by going out dancing, moving to the city alone, drinking even during prohibition, flirting and having love affairs.
Advertising, whether criticized or celebrated, is undeniably a strong force in American society. Portrayals and Images of women have long been used to sell in published advertisements. However, how they have been used has changed enormously throughout the decades. Women have fought to find a lasting and prominent position in their society. Only in the span of twenty years, between 1900’s and 1920’s, the roles of women changed dramatically here in United States.
Women used to dress very conservatively and strict before the turn of the decade. Clothing consisted of fitted dresses, long skirts, and corsets in lady like manners. Since the 1920’s brought women’s rights along, young women decided that they were not willing to waste away their young lives anymore being held down to the rules; they were going to enjoy life. The younger generations of women were breaking away from their old habits and their fashion statements changed their roles in society completely. Women were modeling their lives after popular icons...
The work of Zeitz is essential to understanding the changes within American culture. Several dynamics promote the image of the “flapper.” Even though the “New Woman” is able to break away from traditional values, expanding technology is a dynamic that affects that result. He clearly shows that these women challenge the societal norm through a different approach. The advertisements and publicity can still reinforce several stereotypes. These modernized changes are cultural echoes that American society faces today. There is an immense amount of advertising with the basis of beauty and sexuality. This work is necessary to understand the flapper and the dynamics that made America modern.
In the early 1900’s the ideal woman would be dressed with long dresses and would normally have long hair. Several events such as World War I, in July of 1914, changed women’s role in society. They were not only taking care of the children and the household but they were also taking the role of a man. As men went to war, women replaced them in factories. This caused woman to be more independent. Women realized that having a job was something that could be done; their sex didn’t restrict them from taking this action. This was extremely important as it lead to women being more confident and capable. In the 1920s young women began to change. They went from having long dresses and long hair, to a short haircut and wearing dresses that were above the knee. Women developed a greater interest in looking attractive. According to Russell L. Johnson, the beauty industry grew rapidly as cosmetic expenses sky rocketed from 750 million to 2 billion dollars (Johnson 3). This was one of the causes of the sexual revolution. Women became “ less formal but more expressive (Mag...
Wolf, Naomi, Ed. The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. Random House, 1991.Web. 28 March. 2014.
When William M. Marston, creator of fictional heroine Wonder Woman, asked a girl which female superhero she aspired to be, the girl retorted, “Aw, that’s girls stuff! Who wants to be a girl?” And that is the point; just as the young comic enthusiast suggested, our world has become a dominantly patriarchal society, ranking men over women in the social hierarchy. While some might argue that there is more gender equality in our world now than in any other moment in American history, we still find nonetheless in our culture these continually degrading attitudes towards women. Women today are still only represented as icons of male sexual desire and are only viewed as valuable insofar as they can satisfy that sexual desires. This value is often tied to their attractiveness through their physical qualities, and superhero films offer the medium to accentuate the representation of these qualities. More specifically, superhero movies have become subjected to the male gaze, which proposes that movies are filmed specifically for the heterosexual male audience. This has continued to lead to the falsely characterized perception of women, intriguing the viewer through her hypersexualized style of clothing. Some may claim that superheroes do not relate to actual society and teach us nothing about human nature because they are too fantastical; however, I would suggest that these narratives imply, though indirectly, some theory of human nature. By examining female superhero icons such as Wonder Woman, we can investigate the ways the creators of superhero characters thought both about human nature and the nature of sexual difference. In essence, the portrayal of women is superhero film perpetuate...