The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Not even the man most committed to feminism, as burdened as he might feel supporting a woman economically, sexually, and socially, wants to lose his job to either another man or to a woman. The number of women today who are returning from the workplace to their mothers’ roles, or who would like to if they could afford it, says how slowly the deep, often unconscious feelings of right and wrong change. That so many of the near naked revelers of the sixties and seventies have become conservative pillars of today’s society says that the roots of real change are still shallow. Nothing underscores the slow pace of change like the tragedies associated with sex, mistakes that perhaps could have been avoided if sex had been put at the top of the feminist agenda along with equality in the workplace.

  Feminism Versus Beauty and Men

  It was inevitable that beauty would be jettisoned within the Women’s Movement. It wasn’t simply the mechanics of marching in high heels carrying large purses filled with cosmetics. Lovely beauty was women’s greatest bargaining chip in a system feminism sought to overhaul, a system in which men had all the real power—economic. A woman’s face, her body, were her meal ticket, a certificate to marriage, a name, home, and sustenance. You saw a beautiful woman and expected her to be with a powerful man; you recognized the arrangement. Women thus pursued looks as doggedly as men died at their desks from too early heart attacks, pushing the envelope to prove their manhood.

  A mother looked at her baby daughter’s face and saw her future. But even the loveliest woman soon realized that her days in the sun were limited. Married at twenty (the average age of marriage in 1960), the young wife rose in the morning to see the sun already waning.

  Beauty had to become politically incorrect if women were to imagine ourselves whole and independent, without a man at our side. In our mind’s eye, we had to see not every hair in place, but a life in which we clothed and fed our selves and paid for it, an image diametrically opposed to how our mothers looked and lived. What was essential was that we no longer saw ourselves as trophies for men.

  Woman’s greatest power, however, was and remains that she bears, raises, and shapes the human race. But it was power that, as such, could not be realized. So long as women were totally dependent on men’s money for survival, of what value was conscious awareness of motherhood’s power opposite the fact that mother and children died without “his” food and shelter? The equation of his money for her beauty and child-bearing power was too loaded even to think about. Women ruled from behind the fan; women ruled through manipulation to the extent that we ruled at all. And should a financially successful man awaken to an awareness of his increased power, entitlement nudged him toward a younger, more beautiful woman as his prize.

  Not every man traded up as his fortunes increased. Many loved their wives and families and felt the woman’s role to be very powerful indeed, reminiscent of what his mother had once had over him. Couples often called one another “Mother” and “Father.” President Reagan called Nancy “Mommy.” Nevertheless, there was no discussing how the Patriarchal Deal looked on Libra’s scale.

  Women resisted seeing the role of motherhood as powerful. They still do. Consciously, it didn’t feel like power, wasn’t how the woman’s own mother assessed child-rearing; to this day there remains a suspicion that, if motherhood is portrayed as “power” rather than as the preferred “sacrifice,” women might lose their monopolistic hold on the nursery.

  As for discussing “his” money, it remains the surest sign of imminent argument, a chink in the armor of a marriage. To this day, divorce lawyers have a hard time convincing the jilted wife that she must ascertain her departing husband’s net worth. Her arm may be in a sling from the last battle, but she clings to the belief that he will take care of her.

  When I was growing up, Nice Girl never discussed money. It was bad manners to mention the price paid for a car, a house, even a dress. Even when we women, the owners and practitioners of beauty power, set modern feminism in motion, there was never an honest, open discussion of how we might now use beauty power to our own benefit. It was too hot to handle. Instead, feminism simply outlawed beauty in the early seventies, banned the use of it, the enjoyment of it. Women who came to the rally in makeup, who smiled too invitingly at men, were given “the treatment” by their sisters.

  It is the nature of revolutions to be intolerant. Much of the steam required for the march is gotten from the electric charge of exclusivity that binds the revolutionaries. Rejecting those who didn’t have the right fit, the proper look, the precise political feel, tightened the ranks of The Women’s Movement. It wasn’t just what you said, how you acted, it was also very much how you looked in what you were wearing.

  My own awareness of feminism in the late sixties was gradual, but what I read and heard resonated on a deep, personal level, the visceral response being, “Yes, absolutely, yes!” The feminism that evolved from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique arrived at a time when many sirens competed for our eyes and ears. The world as we had always known it was changing rapidly, and those of us who wanted to change with it believed that for the first time in our lives originality, not conformity, was the rule.

  Feminism’s focus on economic equality made it my kind of club. Who could argue with equal pay? When I was a little girl, hadn’t they made fun of me for saving my nickels and dimes, much as they had questioned why I didn’t want to marry one of the “nice boys” I brought home on vacation? It was essential to me that I pay my own rent and be free of economic dependence on my family, knowing that every dollar I took had strings attached.

  It would take some time before I understood the animosity my Halston suede pants aroused at a rally. I refused to give them up. As time passed and the anti-beauty rules became even stricter, I watched as leaders of The Women’s Movement rejected offers of assistance from powerful women who worked in films, actresses who were beautiful. There was clearly more to feminism’s anti-beauty stand than met the eye.

  “The problem that has no name,” Friedan wrote, “that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.” When I reread The Feminine Mystique today, what jumps out is that Friedan did not write into her agenda the anti-men, antisex, anti-beauty stance that would later characterize feminism. Perhaps it was inevitable that some women would focus on men as the enemy of all the injustices we women endure, but it should be remembered that it did not begin this way. Many of us who were happily dancing and sleeping with men throughout the sixties would awaken in the seventies to find ourselves labeled traitors, women who were not “real feminists.”

  To my knowledge no one spoke it out loud, put it in writing, but eventually any attempt at beauty, at drawing attention to one’s body, one’s face, was outlawed. Sex and beauty cannot be divorced, therefore any man who turned up at the rallies in the early seventies had to have a strong stomach, since anti-men, hate dialogue was the order of business.

  But there were men who were good feminists and who fought for women’s rights. One of them recalls a political rally in New York in the seventies organized to promote the election of a certain feminist. “There were several hundred women there and maybe a dozen men besides me,” he says. “For two hours different speakers attacked the male establishment in a way that made me, how shall I say… nervous? When it was over, the candidate leapt to the podium and cheerfully cried out, ‘Now, let’s all join hands and sing, “What the world needs now is love, love, love.”’”

  The Feminine Mystique didn’t get its brief review in the New York Times until three months after publication, and then the reviewer took exception to the author’s “sweeping generalities,” saying it was “superficial to blame the ‘culture’” for women’s “depression and emptiness.” It made the bestseller list for only six weeks that year, never surpassing Happiness Is a Warm Puppy by Charles Schultz. But by November 1963, Life magazine would call it “an overnight best s
eller, as disruptive of cocktail party conversation and women’s clubs discussions as a tear-gas bomb.”

  My earliest memory of one of these cocktail party conversations was a topic I’d never before heard women discuss, speech. It was a tenet of Patriarchal Society that Nice Girls don’t talk, never raise their voices. As far back as the Middle Ages, writes Marina Warner, “the seduction of women’s talk reflected the seduction of their bodies; it was considered dangerous to Christian men, and condemned as improper per se.” Women’s voices, like our sexuality had to be suppressed.

  Now, for the first time, I stood with other women and talked about the problem of getting our voices heard, forming our thoughts in our minds and speaking them before the thought had vanished. It may sound basic today, but in the late sixties it was exhilarating to stand with a drink in my hand hearing other women say exactly what I’d been living through since adolescence, when I’d first begun to bite my tongue before the spontaneous idea was verbalized.

  “By the time I form a sentence in my head,” one woman said, “the conversation has already moved onto another subject.” We all nodded agreement, and another woman added that wasn’t it strange that when a woman said something interesting, no one heard it, but if a man’s voice said the identical thing ten minutes later, all eyes would turn to him and both women and men would say, “Why, George, what an exciting idea!”

  That was grassroots feminism at work, a reaction to Friedan’s book that had spawned a revolution. You needn’t have read the book to respond to what was in the air. Three years after publication of The Feminine Mystique, in 1966, Friedan was at a luncheon with a group of women who were discussing the deliberate nonenforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which barred sexual discrimination. At some point in the discussion, they decided to form an “NAACP for women.” “I wrote the word ‘NOW’ on a paper napkin,” she said. “‘Our group should be called the National Organization for Women,’ I said, ‘because men should be part of it.’”

  Friedan would remain president of NOW until 1970. Since her original “friendly to men” concept of feminism would not prevail after her leadership, let me quote Friedan’s 1983 epilogue to the twentieth anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique; just maybe, given today’s renewed interest in looks/fashion/beauty, it would be helpful for those who have forgotten, or who are too young to remember, that there was a moment in feminism when women believed we could have equality along with pleasure in both beauty and the love of men. We still can. Here is Friedan:

  I couldn’t define “liberation” for women in terms that denied the sexual and human reality of our need to love, and even sometimes to depend upon, a man. What had to be changed was the obsolete feminine and masculine sex roles that dehumanized sex, making it almost impossible for women and men to make love, not war…. It seemed to me that men weren’t really the enemy—they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

  Looking back at the way things were in the late sixties, the anger and rebellion that was already in the air from all the other revolutions in the streets, it is easy to see how feminism tapped into the look of rebellion—jeans, boots, long hair, the total antifashion statement. You could march against the war in Vietnam and for women’s rights in the same afternoon, changing neither expression nor clothing. My friend Molly was in the front line of the bloody 1968 Chicago riots, and she never traveled without her heated rollers. By 1970, in the Fiftieth Anniversary of Woman’s Suffrage March down Fifth Avenue, women led the march of 50,000, but men also marched. It was still possible to be a good feminist and love men too.

  Psychologist Warren Farrell, who became active in the women’s movement in 1969, served on the board of directors of the New York City chapter of NOW for three years. “Men were in almost every women’s movement that took place, either joining individually or in auxiliaries like ‘Men for ERA,’” he reminds me today. “Betty Friedan and Karen DeCrow—NOW president from 1971 to 1974—were always very, very, very, very committed to equality between men and women, not just women’s rights.”

  When feminism eliminated men from our struggle for equality, we took a road that eventually led to today’s victim mentality; we also strengthened the divisive War Between the Women. Modern man didn’t invent the Patriarchal Deal so much as inherit it. Men too suffered from society’s demands. Yes, they controlled the money, but you didn’t have to be clairvoyant to see that most men were barren of the kind of feelings that sustain life, caring, loving, tender, empathic emotions. In the early seventies, sociologist Jessie Bernard would write of the heightened rate of alcoholism, suicide, and death among men who lived without women.

  The woman who would follow Friedan as acknowledged leader of the Feminist Movement, Gloria Steinem, at some level clearly believed this too. Men, as lovers and friends, have been at the heart of her life and never seemed to interfere with her feminism. Steinem is the key to any understanding of feminism’s absence of comment on how looks should function in the world we have so dramatically altered. She knows men, knows how to use them to get what she needs politically and personally. This is not a criticism. We use whatever resources we have. Why should the trade-off of money for power be more acceptable than the uses of beauty? Would a member of the Kennedy clan hesitate to use the family name to gain advantage?

  When Steinem needed a powerful name to pen the foreword to her first book in 1963, titled The Beach Book, a lighthearted collection of songs, puzzles, chess problems, instructions on how to get a tan, peel a sunburn, build sand castles, she called on aristocratic John Kenneth Galbraith. He obliged. “Except that I like this book and the girl who put it together, I could seem a most improbable person to write this introduction,” he begins.

  But he did write it. Thirty years later I heard that her lover, Mort Zuckerman, would lend Ms. magazine $1.4 million. In the years in between those favors, men as well as women would personally and professionally assist Steinem for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was and is that she is lovely to look at. Why must an asset, any asset, go unacknowledged, regardless of its association with a time when beauty was our only ticket to power?

  If there were a face to be attached to modern feminism, it would be Steinem’s; a portrait on a postal stamp honoring feminism, it would be hers. We can’t possibly understand today’s ambivalence on issues of men and beauty and omit what Steinem herself stood for. She cannot be left out of the discussion because she was the feminist army’s general and Pinup Girl. Her face alone triggers our memory of feminism becoming popular. The fact that it was and is a great-looking face matters.

  “Personification of womanpower” was the caption under a photo of Steinem in a Time magazine article in January 1969. “One of the best dates to take to a New York party these days,” the article opened, “…one of the most arresting names to drop—is Gloria Steinem. [She] is not only a successful freelance writer… she is also a trim, undeniably female, blonde-streaked brunette who has been described as ‘the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton.’ She does something for her soft suits and clinging dresses, has legs worthy of her miniskirts, and a brain that keeps conversation lively without getting tricky.”

  In a photo that accompanied the Time article, Gloria sits, long legs bared, worthy of a centerfold, not the costume or the pose assumed when she traveled the country raising “money and consciousness for the still amorphous and revolutionary state of mind called the Women’s Liberation Movement.” This is not to criticize the dual persona; there is, as our parents always told us, “a time and a place” for the power of sexual beauty. It helped influence wealthy, powerful men but it was not wanted at the diverse feminist rallies at which Steinem was speaking, often as a team with a black feminist partner.

  “By speaking together at hundreds of public meetings,” she wrote in her book of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, “we hoped to widen a public image of the women
’s movement created largely by its first homegrown media event, The Feminine Mystique.”

  To Steinem’s thinking, Betty Friedan’s book was aimed at “white, well-educated, suburban women” and as such had limited appeal. Though Friedan would eventually endorse Steinem’s leadership, acknowledging feminism’s need for a young, articulate leader, bad blood remained between them. That Steinem was a beauty didn’t hurt her candidacy; feminism had gotten itself a name in the media as being an army of disgruntled, unattractive women who were acting out their anger at the men who rejected them. A stupid disclaimer but useful nonetheless to a media controlled by Patriarchal Society.

  Gloria Steinem was heaven-sent. While she may describe herself in her autobiographical Revolution from Within as a woman who never outgrew her sense of herself as a pudgy, unattractive little girl, she flew in the face of adversaries of the movement, as proud and beautiful as the masthead on a fine schooner.

  “One could argue that for a few years during the late 1960s and early 70s, there were two competing feminist movements—liberal feminism and women’s liberation,” wrote Flora Davis in Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960. Among the latter were the New York Radical Women, the Redstockings, the Feminists, Cell 16, Bread and Roses, and SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men); they were a younger group of feminists, mostly in their twenties, many of them rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, campus radicalism, and opposition to the Vietnam War. “When it came to tactics,” wrote Davis, “they thought in terms of civil disobedience—revolutionary tactics designed to force revolutionary changes.”