“beauty” date from no earlier than the 30’s when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.
For the first time, new technologies could reproduce- in fashion plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and rotogravures-images of how women should look. In the 1840’s the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful’ women first appeared in mid-century. Copies of classical artworks, postcards of society beauties and royal mistresses, Currier and Ives prints, and porcelain figurines flooded the separate sphere to which middle class women were confined.
Since the industrial revolution, middle-class Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much by material constraints. This situation, unique to this group, means that analyses that trace “cultural conspiracies” are uniquely plausible in relation to them. The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-class women to act out the role of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a conviction that respectable women were sexually anesthetic, and a definition of women’s work that occupied them with repetitive, time-consuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lace making. All such Victorian inventions as these served a double function-that is, though they were encouraged as a means to expend female energy and intelligence in harmless ways, women often used them to express genuine creativity and passion.
But in spite of middle-class women’s creativity with fashion and embroidery and child-rearing, and, a century later, with the role of the suburban housewife that devolved from these social fictions, the fiction’s main purpose was served. During ac century and half of unprecedented feminist agitation, they effectively counteracted middle-class women’s dangerous new leisure, literacy, and relative freedom from material constraints.
Though these time, and mind-consuming fictions about women’s natural role adapted themselves to resurface in the postwar Feminine Mystique, when the second wave of the women’s movement took apart what women’s magazines had portrayed as the “romance”, “science”, and “adventure” of homemaking and suburban family life, they temporarily failed. The cloying domestic fiction of “togetherness” lost its meaning and middle-class women walked out of their front doors in masses.
So the fictions simply transformed themselves once more: Since the women’s movement had successfully taken apart most other necessary fictions of femininity, all the work of social control once spread out over the whole network of these fictions had to be reassigned to the only strand left intact, which action consequently strengthened it a hundred fold. This reimposed onto liberated women’s faces and bodies, all the limitations, taboos, and punishments of the repressive laws, religious injunctions and reproductive enslavement that no longer carried sufficient force. Inexhaustible but ethereal beauty work took over from inexhaustible but ephemeral housework. As the