She Walks in Beauty : Women: The feminine ideal and the feminist ideal need not be at odds, say feminists gathered to discuss self-esteem.
The talk is of beauty. And face lifts. And the temptation to have a face lift.
Exasperated with the tentativeness of some remarks, Lucille Hubbard finally blurts out: “I’ve had a face lift. I never made it a secret. . . . About 10 years before I had it, I looked at myself and thought, ‘My God, if a dress was this wrinkled and fit this poorly, I wouldn’t wear it. . . .’ It’s not so much about looking younger. It’s about looking better.”
Murmurs of recognition travel around the room as Hubbard, an independent researcher whose youthful looks belie her 60-plus years, continues:
“The game is not going to be won. But that does not mean it is not worth playing.”
Talk about looks and figures and face lifts may be standard fare at beauty parlors and kaffeeklatsches. But it doesn’t always get this frank. Nor are the women always card-carrying feminists, as were most who gathered in the library of a Brentwood home.
This was a workshop, part of a daylong retreat, the final session of the fifth annual feminist Think Tank led by writer and activist Betty Friedan under the auspices of USC’s Institute for the Study of Women and Men.
Beverly Seligson, 57, a Santa Barbara psychotherapist, says she had a face lift a year ago. Despite grave doubts, she calls it a “great decision. I feel wonderful. It’s not about attracting males. It was about me, feeling good, feeling confidence.”
Her sister-in-law, writer Marcia Seligson, 54, acknowledges the temptation, and she talks of feminist friends pulling their faces every which way to see how it might look.
“It’s a trap,” she says. “It feeds right into self-esteem: ‘Will I love myself better and be happier when I look in the mirror?’ The truth for me is, I’ve never been happy with myself when I look in the mirror. I’ve never loved the way I looked.”
Lois Banner, a USC history professor whose book, “American Beauty,” traces physical appearance in United States history, picks up on those remarks. Face lifts are a perennial question and conversation piece among her women friends, Banner says, and she is not immune.
“But then I say to myself,” she confesses, laughing, “I’ve muckraked beauty for half of my career! I can’t do this.”
The think tank, which meets monthly during the spring semester, is less academic and structured than most such groups. Along with scholars and teachers, it brings together career women, professionals, businesswomen and a few housewives involved in community volunteer work. And a few men. Their small number is not a policy, rather the result of admittedly inadequate recruitment.
Generally, the group addresses social and political issues that concern feminism: surrogate motherhood, parental leave, work and family, affirmative action, the environment and eco-feminism, gender.
This year, however, the group turned inward, to more personal topics. The monthly sessions--beauty, ambition and relationships and aging--support the theme of “Reconceptualizing Self-Esteem.”
All three proved personally taxing, but beauty disturbed them most as feminists, touching their vulnerabilities.
And humor.
Carolyn Heilbrun, a Columbia University humanities professor and author of “Reinventing Womanhood,” keynoted this year’s sessions in January. A heavyset woman in her 60s, with no makeup and a no-nonsense hairdo, Heilbrun told of a faculty reception at which young graduate students had looked right through her. She was a non-person--until she put on her name tag.
“I wish you could have seen the difference,” she said dryly, of the people who then flocked around her. Heilbrun said she had concluded that women of a certain age, say as they near 50, would do well to ditch their lifelong careers and take up burglary and robbery:
“No one can ever remember what we look like.”
Banner, one of the workshop moderators, opened the final retreat by asking participants to “get the personal part out on the table.” Later, she said, organizers hoped to “move from the personal to the political structures of beauty.”
Banner, in her 50s, said that she grew up in the 1950s and fit that decade’s beauty model--blue eyes, blond hair. She had even been Miss Inglewood.
That “terrible burden” interfered with her being taken seriously in academe. But, she added, with not a little irony, “As I have aged, it has gotten to be much less a problem.”
The personal consumed the group, including their misgivings about the topic’s propriety. Several admitted that they are bothered that the topic had been, and still is, so important to them. Meaning, of course, “after all these years of the women’s liberation movement.”
“It seems so superficial,” Banner said, “but it is so extraordinarily profound given the nature of women’s being. It has to do with consumerism, class, ethnicity, ethics, objectification, subjectification. . . .”
Jane Deknatel, a tall, striking British-born woman who has a performance coaching service, said she figured out as a young girl that “there was beauty and there was power. I wanted power. Only boys had it. I made a clear decision at age 10 that I would not look like a silly girl. No curly hair, etc. I became androgynous.”
Sitting there with closely cropped hair, perhaps wearing makeup--but no rosy cheeks or ruby lips in sight--and wearing a tailored, very short brown suit and plain, flat shoes, Deknatel didn’t have to try hard to convince: “I lived my business, professional, social, intimate life with that concept intact.”
Still, she says, when a friend told her flatly that she was kidding herself, that she was using her beauty as a tool, she knew the friend was right.
A photographer entered the room while the women spoke and without looking down, writer Sandra Winston quietly pulled on her jacket.
Moments later, Winston, describing herself as genetically heavy, announced to the group: “I saw a photographer walk in and I put my jacket on. I did not want to be a white blob. It was a real, personal, immediate and political decision.”
Emily Card, a writer and lawyer, spoke up: “You have to realize a group of men at this stage in their careers wouldn’t be doing this, and yet we’re sitting here talking about it.”
But Card certainly wasn’t trying to put herself above the debate. The well-groomed, stylishly dressed woman--who says she doesn’t “enjoy being described as fat, but let’s face it: I’m not skinny”--had quietly left the room for a few minutes.
“I had to get a drink of water and a breath of fresh air. This is upsetting. About myself, I’m large, but I feel I have not let myself go to pot,” she told the others.
She once had a good figure, Card said, but got real busy and gained a lot of weight. She keeps up her appearance and plans on losing weight.
Actress Susan Anspach seemed to strike a nerve with other group members when she talked of current beauty standards imposed by society--or a male patriarchy:
“It’s a goal that is ultimately unattainable--a young boy’s body, a young girl’s face. Success is impossible. Youth can only decline. Beauty has to become more feasible.”
Anspach cuts a startling figure at a beauty workshop. Wearing a short, filmy dress, black tights, boots, gray sweat shirt jacket and a cloud of permed, bleached hair, she straddles her chair and blows bubble gum.
“I’m an expert,” she said. “I’m personally a victim of it (a male-imposed ideal of beauty), but I’m also a victor. I use it.”
Drawing attention to her attire, she continued: “I’ve always made myself look as offensive as possible. It’s a combination of being acceptably cute or beautiful and saying at the same time, ‘Don’t get too close.’ ”
Allison Baker, an “aspiring writer” in her 20s, described her ambivalence about her generation’s image of clothes and exercise:
“It’s damaging. It’s linked to my sexuality. If I don’t work out, I start to feel not as beautiful. I’m guilty. I’m not what society wants.”
Still, group members agreed, the feminist movement and other social forces are slowly influencing how society sees and interprets beauty.
Cynthia Robbins, an education advocate and one of few African-American women in the group, said she’s pleased that finally there is a greater appreciation of African beauty: “The standards are expanding, broadening. . . . If you feel beautiful, you project beauty.”
Looking around the room, she smiled. “I’ve been looking at you all very carefully,” Robbins said. “Everyone really is beautiful. We do not see it. We are our worst critics.”
Summarized Friedan: “We’re reconceptualizing beauty. The subject defines it. We’re not just going to let ourselves be objectified and defined by others.
“Goddammit! Feminism enables us all to be beautiful.”