Anjelika9: переводы

→Heroines

→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 advertise-
ments…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.

→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 re-
turned 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.

→Women’s magazines accompanied women’s advances and the simul-
taneous 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.

→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 stirredup 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.”

→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 dan-
cing 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 agricul-
tural 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.”

→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.

→Sociologists have described the effect on women of what such laws
legalize. Sociologist Deborah L. Sheppard, in The Sexuality of Organization, describes her discovery that “the informal rules and guidelines
about the appropriateness of appearance keep shifting, which helps
explain the continuous appearance of books and magazines which tell
women how to look and behave at work.” Organizational sociologists
haven’t addressed the notion that they keep shifting because they’re set
up to keep shifting. “Women,” Sheppard continues, “perceive themselves
and other women to be confronting constantly the dualistic experience
of being ‘feminine’ and ‘businesslike’ at the same time, while they do
not perceive men experiencing the same contradiction.” “Businesslike
yet feminine” is a favorite description of clothing sold in mail-order
catalogs aimed at working women, and this elusive dualism is what
triggered the strong response in the United States to a series of ads for
a lingerie manufacturer that showed businesswear blowing open to
reveal a lace-clad nakedness. But the words “businesslike” and “feminine,” as we saw, are each used to manipulate the other as well as the
woman caught in the middle.

→Unfortunately for them, working women do not have access to legal
advice when they get dressed in the morning. But they intuit that this
maze exists. Is it any surprise that, two decades into the legal evolution
of the professional beauty qualification, working women are tense to
the point of insanity about their appearance? Their neuroses don’t arise
out of the unbalanced female mind, but are sane reactions to a deliberately manipulated catch-22 in the workplace. Legally, women don’t
have a thing to wear.

→This tradition pits beautiful, vapid Jane Fairfax (“I cannot separate
Miss Fairfax from her complexion”) against the subtler Emma Wood-
house 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-effa-
cing 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.

→Women’s writing, on the other hand, turns the myth on its head. Fe
male 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 ro-
mances, 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.

→Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine
into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women
are allowed a mind or a body but not both. A common allegory that
teaches women this lesson is the pretty-plain pairing: of Leah and Rachel
in the Old Testament and Mary and Martha in the New; Helena and
Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Anya and Dunyasha in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard;
Daisy Mae and Sadie Hawkins in Dogpatch; Glinda and the Wicked
Witch of the West in Oz; Veronica and Ethel in Riverdale; Ginger and
Mary Ann in Gilligan’s Island; Janet and Chrissie in Three’s Company;
Mary and Rhoda in The Mary Tyler Moore Show; and so forth. Male culture seems happiest to imagine two women together when they are
defined as being one winner and one loser in the beauty myth.

→Since the fourteenth century, male culture has silenced women by
taking them beautifully apart: The catalog of features, developed by
the troubadours, first paralyzed the beloved woman into beauty’s si
lence. The poet Edmund Spenser perfected the catalog of features in
his hymn the “Epithalamion”; we inherit that catalog in forms ranging
from the list-your-good-points articles in women’s magazines to
fantasies in mass culture that assemble the perfect women.

→Then it was applied to any job in which a woman faces one other
man: A fifty-four-year-old American woman, quoted in The Sexuality
of Organization, said her boss replaced her one day without warning.
“He had told her that he ‘wanted to look at a younger woman’ so his
‘spirits could be lifted.’ She said that ‘her age…had never bothered her
before he mentioned it to her.’” Now the PBQ has spread to any job in
which a woman does not work in complete isolation.

→Then the PBQ was applied to any job that brings women in contact
with the public. A woman manager I know of in one of the British John
Lewis Partnership stores, who gave her job “my all,” was called in by
her supervisor to hear that he was very happy with her work, but that
“she needed some improvement from the neck up.” He wanted her to
wear what she called “a mask” of makeup, and to bleach and tease her
hair. “It made me feel,” she said to a friend, “like all the work I did
didn’t matter as much as what I’d look like standing around on the
floor dressed up like a bimbo. It made me feel that there was no point in my doing
my job well.” The men, she added, had to do nothing comparable.

→Then to the service industries: prestige waitresses, bartenders, hostesses, catering staff. These are the beauty-intensive jobs that provide a
base for the ambitions of the rural, local, and regional beauties who
flow into the nation’s urban centers and whose sights are set on “making
it” in the display professions—ideally to become one of the 450 full-
time American fashion models who constitute the elite corps deployed
in a way that keeps 150 million American women in line. (The model
fantasy is probably the most widespread contemporary dream shared
by young women from all backgrounds.)

→In Maureen Murphy and Eileen Davidson v. Stakis Leisure, Ltd., we can
see the wave of the future. Waitresses objected to a change in “image”
that put them in a “more revealing” uniform and forced them to wear
makeup and nail polish. One waitress described the costumes as
“straight out of The Story of O,” consisting of a miniskirt and a plunging
cleavage over an external corset or basque so tight that the women bled
from it under their arms. One of the litigating women was pregnant
when she was forced to wear it. Management admitted that the change
was imposed on the women as a sexual draw for male customers.
Waiters had no such requirements made of them. (Incidentally, the
waitresses’ obligation to appear in a state of undress in front of the op-
posite sex violates Sisley v. Britannia Security Systems, which ruled that
the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act could be used to “preserve decency or
privacy” from the opposite sex while “being in a state of undress.”) The
women’s counsel got nowhere pointing out that makeup, revealing
costumes, and nail polish sexualize the dress code in a way that cannot
be parallel for men. This case too was dismissed as de minimis—too
trivial to consider. The women lost the case but kept their jobs—for six
weeks. They have both been fired; they have filed a complaint charging
unfair dismissal.

→So if you refuse to wear a sexually exploitive costume to work in Great Britain, you can lose your job. But in Snowball v. Gardner Merchant, Ltd., and Wileman v. Minilec Engineering, Ltd., a woman’s perceived
sexuality was ruled relevant in minimizing the harm done to her by
sexual harassment. In the latter case, Miss Wileman was awarded the
derisory sum of fifty pounds (seventy-five dollars) for four and a half
years’ harassment on the grounds that her feelings couldn’t have been
much injured since she wore “scanty and provocative clothing” to work:
“If a girl on the shop floor goes around wearing provocative clothes
and flaunting herself, it is not unlikely,” the tribunal ruled, that she will
get harassed. The tribunal accepted men’s testimony that defined Miss
Wileman’s clothes as sexually inciting. Miss Wileman’s plaintive echoing
of Mechelle Vinson’s lawyer when she protested that her clothes were
definitely not “scanty and provocative” was ignored in the ruling.

→We can save the British woman the baffling guided tour through her
wardrobe: It’s the same situation, if not worse. The GOQ is defined as
permitting “sex discrimination” when the job requires, among other ruling not only that an employer is “entitled to a large measure of dis-
cretion in controlling the image of his establishment,” but also that the
whole issue is insignificant: They ruled that telling a woman how to
dress was no more than trivial. In Jeremiah v. Ministry of Defense, employers avoided hiring women for higher-paid work on the grounds that it
was dirty and would ruin their looks. Lord Denning in his ruling mused:
“A woman’s hair is her crowning glory…. She does not like it disturbed,
especially when she has just had a ‘hair-do.’” The employers’ counsel
asserted that compelling women to ruin their hairdos at a higher rate
of pay would lead to industrial unrest.
things, “physical form or authenticity—for example, a model or an
actor.” But since 1977, M. Schmidt v. Austicks Bookshops, Ltd. has been
broadly interpreted to make it legal for her to be hired or fired generally
on the basis of physical appearance. Miss Schmidt lost her job and the
case because she wore trousers to her work in a bookstore. The Employment Appeal Tribunal dismissed her case, which was based on the fact
that the dress code was more restrictive for women than men, by ruling not only that an employer is “entitled to a large measure of discretion in controlling the image of his establishment,” but also that the
whole issue is insignificant: They ruled that telling a woman how to
dress was no more than trivial. In Jeremiah v. Ministry of Defense, employ-
ers avoided hiring women for higher-paid work on the grounds that it
was dirty and would ruin their looks. Lord Denning in his ruling mused:
“A woman’s hair is her crowning glory…. She does not like it disturbed,
especially when she has just had a ‘hair-do.’” The employers’ counsel
asserted that compelling women to ruin their hairdos at a higher rate
of pay would lead to industrial unrest.

→It is not that women’s identities are naturally weak. But “ideal” imagery
has become obsessively important to women because it was meant to
become so. Women are mere “beauties” in men’s culture so that culture
can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not
desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue. A beautiful
heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality,
interesting and ever changing, while “beauty” is generic, boring, and
inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, “beauty” is amoral: If
a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a
fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence—but it is
not a moral act. From the “beauties” in male culture, women learn a
bitter amoral lesson—that the moral lessons of their culture exclude
them.