The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  After extensive testing around the country of coworkers’ first impressions and reactions to certain styles, Molloy settled on the specific colors, fabrics, patterns, cuts, and styles of clothes that had produced the desired effect on peers and superiors in the workplace. Thousands of women assiduously followed Molloy’s lists of what was In and Out, his commands on what one must Never do as well as the Always list.

  As Molloy’s book climbed the bestseller list to the number one spot, his Success-suited followers around the country pledged, in effect, to “do this so that women may have as effective a work uniform as men and therefore be better able to compete on an equal footing:” It is easy today to spoof the look, the attaché cases specified to replace the feminine handbag, but this was war. Molloy understood that it was the women who had to be trained to see and think of themselves as people who wouldn’t get a second glance on the street; these women were the first wave of the invasion.

  But by the mid–eighties, women were longing to slip into something more exciting than Molloy’s formula; perhaps entitlement describes what a woman feels when she has worked hard, earned the money, and wants a reward. There was an itch where beauty had once been. Women began discovering that it was a heady experience paying for one’s self-selected wardrobe: “This is me,” she would say, selecting something more fashionable than the Dark Blue Suit.

  “But the fashion industry trammeled the experiment in creating businesswear for women,” scolded Naomi Wolf, “and they lost the instant professional status and moderate sexual camouflage that the male uniform provides. The shift in fashion [away from Molloy’s suit] ensured that the fashion industry would not suffer, while it also ensured that women would have simultaneously to work harder to be ‘beautiful’ and work harder to be taken seriously.”

  Is Ms. Wolf telling us that working women are mere pawns and made no conscious decision when we returned to fashion? Her words do us discredit. As anthropologist Lionel Tiger says, “I’ve never believed in the brainwashing theory of women. That they do things because they see ads, because they see people on television, because they’re told to believe certain things. I think they do what they want, and when women didn’t have much power they still wanted beauty. And now that women have more power, they want more beauty. That should tell us something; it should tell us a lot.”

  My first suspicion that women weren’t being sufficiently nourished by The Dress for Success Suit was The Invasion of the Nail Salons. It was the early to mid-eighties. In its subtle way, it was a touching beginning, this inevitable return of beauty sneaking in by way of the fingertip. So swiftly did they spread, these clandestine nail boutiques upstairs, downstairs, sandwiched in between larger shops, that I awoke one day and they were everywhere—today, nearly 35,000 of them. Prior to feminism, the only place you could get a manicure was in a beauty salon; now women of all ages were waiting in line for the forbidden touch of blood-red sensuality. The Success Suit was excellent coverage but, like an army blanket, its rough texture made women mindful of that missing part of our selves. Before fashion’s revival, first came long red nails. And sexy lingerie.

  Ah, lingerie. The word itself cannot be translated. Lingerie is not underwear, or “intimate apparel,” which was all we had in this country, at least in my lifetime, prior to feminism. In America there were rows and rows of blah drip-dry, stolid, bland bras, panties, and uninspiring slips that served no sensual purpose.

  It wasn’t until my first trip to Europe that I saw what I’d always longed for: sexy lingerie. In Paris and Rome, in countless tiny shops, they would custom-make you garter belts of lace the color of café au lait, pale-blue satin slips with straps of tiny rosebuds. The Duchess of Windsor wasn’t the only woman with a passion for beautiful sexy panties, lacy camisoles, and delicately sculpted bras that cupped the breasts as might a lover’s hand.

  Today there are many designers of sensual lingerie, and Victoria’s Secret, which opened its first stores in 1982, now has 601 stores nationwide. But Fernando Sanchez deserves the title of El Primo. Was it in the late seventies when I first saw his black velvet and marabou wrap in Vogue? On first sighting, something awoke in me deep, deep, wherever orgasm begins; it also touched a corner of my heart, as in tenderness, as few things do. The sleeves were slit from shoulder to wrist and banded in black satin, which also tied the waist. There I sat, as today, at my typewriter in the oldest, shabbiest pair of trousers and worn-out sweater, my writing uniform; perhaps like the woman in her navy Success Suit, I longed for the touch of velvet, silk, and satin against my skin. My work fed me generously, but the other me saw myself in that black velvet creation, even though I had no place to wear it, so informal was my life. I bought it anyway.

  I wore it while I cooked for my friends, me in this Harlow-esque creation, the steam curling the marabou as I served dinner at a long refectory table where men and women loudly argued the politics of the new world we were creating. To those of us addicted to sexy lingerie, peignoirs, bustiers, it mattered not a jot that friends shook their heads and smiled at the sight of me engulfed in steam at the stove. I was taking care of many things at once, my work, my play, and not least, my sex. I still have that marabou robe.

  I praise Sanchez as I would the poets. He was an innovator of sexual beauty at the height of The Dress for Success Suit. And he was right; we can have both, which is what we are still working on—the mix of work, love, and sex. Ironically, nothing provoked our critical need for something so deeply feminine as beautiful lingerie as did our mass entry into the workplace. Women were desperate for reassurance of our sexual selves as we elbowed deeper and deeper into competition with men and one another. Those who would blame the fashion industry for turning women off from the bland blue suit show their ignorance of what makes us women powerful.

  Do you remember my dance of adolescence, a description of how young girls awaken to their sexuality? Imagine, then, another dance, one of a grown woman awakening in the early morning to go to her job, appraising the dark suit designed effectively to hide her lovely contours, to repel the eye and focus attention elsewhere, for instance, on her many accomplishments. Before she dons her armor, however, she reaches for a black satin teddy, steps into it slowly, allowing the weightless bit of fabric to glide up over her thighs, her hips, her breasts, until the tiny straps are in place. She looks at herself in the mirror, appraising the beauty that no one else may see, that no man may ever admire. But all day long as it moves against her body, she is reminded of her sexual center.

  There is something tender but also proud about a woman spending a lot of money on a silk and lace camisole that she alone will see. It is a private luxury, all the more complex in its powerful return on the investment when we buy it with our own money, for it speaks of our identity; we feed on our sexual image much as we require bread. Buying our own beautiful lingerie, responding to it, says, I am sexual all by myself, the star of my own erotic fantasies, and if I choose to share them or myself with another person, I bring the power of my independent identity to that liaison.

  By perpetuating The Male Brute mentality, we make our understanding of how we might use beauty far more arduous than is necessary. It has always been precarious for women to balance what used to be called “beauty and brains.” The woman who chooses to buy an elegant, stand-out Gianfranco Ferré suit with her hard-earned money and to wear the killer outfit to her place of employment has her work cut out for her.

  She should know this consciously, that she has every right in the world to wear it and also that others are going to react, which is normal; she should be prepared to handle what she sets in motion in a way that neither disrupts business nor her own peace of mind. She has put envy and desire in play, maybe even harassment from both sexes. (Yes, women do harass other women, sometimes sexually, sometimes rivalrously.) Instead of educating women to their rights and responsibilities regarding the uses of beauty in the workplace, we allow men’s sexual harassment of women to grow into a national plague.


  Nor have men been raised to handle women’s sexual beauty in a work environment; since it is we women who now choose to involve our sexuality in that asexual environment, the weight of responsibility falls first on us. Having brought dynamite into the office, it behooves us to understand the danger. No man should violate a woman. But what is our role in the drama? Sexual beauty is a force meant to excite, to arouse, certainly to demand attention. Sexual beauty is built into the mating ritual.

  Now we have the mating ritual in the competitive office and men totally unschooled from birth as to how even to look at a sexual woman, much less speak, act. It is no good ordering women to go back to the Dark Blue Suit. It is certainly no good blaming men for their inept reactions and leaving women totally blameless. We are all involved. Women’s entry into the workplace is an evolutionary step and should be addressed as such.

  One of my heroines in early modern feminism was attorney Flo Kennedy, whose heart was true but who refused to blather some of the witless slogans or to abandon certain beauty accessories. “Nail polish or false eyelashes isn’t politics,” she said in 1974. “If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant. I don’t take dictation from the pig-o-cratic style setters who say I should dress like a middle-aged colored lady. My politics don’t depend on whether my tits are in or out of a bra.”

  At a rally at the glamorous Four Seasons restaurant, to which we had all trooped in jeans and boots, the thrust of the speeches on getting women into political office was that women, simply by being women, would automatically bring honesty goodness, and peace to the entire world. Unable to take the rhetoric any longer, Kennedy stood calmly and said, “Please, let’s cut the shit.” She also refused to abandon her long red nails or her purple fox coat unlit it was, in her words, “stolen at a rally.”

  If we women don’t learn to use the power of beauty more effectively, men will soon take beauty as their own and have a much better time with it. Men have had to come to terms with beauty’s power since their days with mother, when they felt very keenly that their need of her beauty reflected on to them. In time a man learned to win a beautiful woman of his own, but today we women not only work alongside him, we compete for that monetary power that was once only his. Having felt beauty’s potency, knowing it well, he will now use it like a pro. While women fight among ourselves over who is the holiest feminist, men will run off with the beauty crown, leaving us to compete for them, maybe provide for them, work our little fingers to the bone, ruing the day that we never learned to use beauty more profitably.

  Feminism should stop debunking and begin studying beauty. Conferences, panels, symposia should be arguing the many uses of beauty, defrocking the old denials. We are no longer as powerless as we were under Paternalistic rule, when beauty was all we had to trade. Think of what we might do with beauty, how much more we might enjoy it, if we understood it and mastered competition so that it didn’t level us.

  If we don’t stop attacking one another because of what we wear and don’t wear, we will lose sight of precisely what we marched against twenty-five years ago, that limited life wherein we edited our thoughts before we spoke, stood in front of the mirror buttoning and unbuttoning our blouse, unsure of how much cleavage we dared show. Then, as now, it wasn’t men’s censure we feared so much as other women’s.

  Who is so mighty that she should draw a line regarding how a feminist should look? Of course some of us have returned to beauty. What we should be asking is why some can’t stand it when one of us is the center of attention. Envy is nasty but can only be dealt with when recognized. Here we are, paying our own rent, running for public office, managing corporations, but still grousing because Madonna, Streisand, whoever, is hurting feminism by dressing up and showing off.

  Madonna invented herself and never apologized for her sexual exhibitionism. Instead, she created an empire and an enormous following of fans who take courage from her. Envy flies around a woman who couples economic success with sexual exhibitionism. Whatever her next incarnation may be, Madonna’s greatest success was with young people who saw in her a more honest brand of feminism with which they could identify. In a society that compartmentalizes each, there is a powerful political force in a woman who can combine intelligence, beauty, and sexuality and make them pay off.

  Another woman who got caught up in the conflict between beauty and economic power is Diane Sawyer, who has a restraint typical of pre-feminism years. Before she became a star on CBS on 60 Minutes, she had been a speechwriter at the White House. One autumn day in 1987 she turned up in an absolutely gorgeous double-page photo in Vanity Fair. Ha! thought I, now here is a truly beautiful woman enjoying the pleasure of exhibitionistic glamour, allowing herself to do it because she has professionally earned it. Photographer Annie Leibovitz had posed her in a languorous, horizontal shot, wearing evening pajamas (not transparent), head flung back, the famous long blond hair cascading.

  It didn’t take long for the combined forces of envy and competition to muster and then to confront Sawyer—who was, at that moment, negotiating a new contract—with the pronouncement that she “had gone too far,” exposed too much sexual beauty, been “unprofessional.” The man with whom she was then living said that she had feared the criticism, had come home that night after the photo shoot wringing her hands, lamenting that she had let the seductive Annie Leibovitz talk her into the glamorous pose.

  One night at a dinner party, I commented on how hopeless I thought her critics were. From the press she was getting, you would have thought she had posed nude. My dinner partners, all media and publishing heavies, turned on me roundly: “An anchorwoman, someone who reads the news and wants to be taken seriously, cannot, should not show her beauty so, well, so profusely! It will ruin her career!”

  In fact, Sawyer went on to sign a $7 million contract with ABC, a big increase over her previous salary Did the photo help or hinder? You decide. As for Sawyer, alas, she quickly cut her magnificent hair, which I saw as penance on her part. But I miss it, the playing out of her beauty power—definitely magnified by the hair—along with the economic and professional status. It will take another generation, those of you now ascending, male and female, to knit our collective resources of power into one life.

  Be assured, there will be human sacrifices along the way, much hairstyling, as with Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose politics and tresses became entangled. Interestingly, her odyssey from Fashion Innocent also included crucial time in Annie Leibovitz’s glamorizing lens. Off to a rough start at the beginning of her husband’s Presidency, she emerged victorious on all fronts, including beauty. But Hillary Rodham Clinton is no ordinary First Lady. She belongs to a generation of women who look as independent, opinionated, aggressive, and competitive as any man, some would say even more so. She looks this way because she lives this way. To put this family, in particular, to put her in soft focus, would be a lie.

  Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story is so interesting because her looks dramatically changed in front of our eyes and, more specifically, in front of the eyes of the press and television cameras. Because she is the first First Lady to go through such a transformation, you might say a public Day of Beauty, it is tempting to speculate on what turned this “unfashionable” woman into such a looker. “I would grind my teeth and wish I could sit Hillary on the edge of my tub and give her some makeup lessons,” said the President’s mother, the late Virginia Kelley, a self-proclaimed exhibitionist. “Show her how to bring out all that natural beauty she was covering up by going natural. None of that mattered to her, though. She was too busy getting educated and doing good things like starting youth-advocate programs. Makeup didn’t mean a whit to her.”

  Well, it does now, and I would imagine that a woman who has so successfully accrued power over the years must find it interesting, if not also pleasurable, to experience the power of beauty after having eschewed it for so long. Stylists who worked on her appearance early in her husband’s administration commented that she never looked in the mirr
or during their ministrations, so fixed was she on her pre-television notes.

  But there must have been compliments, smiles, a new look in people’s eyes when they spoke to her after that speech, after the eye-catching Annie Leibovitz photo of her in the sexy Donna Kazan dress. This is the stuff of fairy tales. Hillary was accustomed to praise for her achievements, but there is nothing quite like the healing warmth of praise for one’s person.

  Hillary Rodham Clinton’s saga is like a morality tale in reverse; before she became beautiful, we already knew she was no idealized household nun. This is a modern woman, arguing, fighting her way through a political drama, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but using her full arsenal. Now she is also beautiful. We have a full, working portrait of the de-idealized woman, good and bad. This is just what the doctor ordered; we’ve needed for a long time to surrender the image of women as kinder and more virtuous than men.

  For generations women have disguised the many uses of beauty, just as we devalued our power in the nursery, making it into a sacrificial role rather than the magisterial one it is. In a society where women had no real economic power, manipulative power was granted us. It is time to get off the pedestal, drop the victim guise. It is good that in our living rooms on the evening news we are seeing that the most powerful woman in the country is learning the power of her beauty.

  The Denial of Competition

  I could not write this book if I had not grown up seeing beauty at work prior to the sixties, when the world changed. Once the feminist army was under way, we couldn’t have women competing for the mirror. If we were to get our share of the economic pie, which was owned and operated by men, then that currency with which we had once bought a nibble had to go. Starting in the late sixties and building through the seventies, men and beauty were suspect.