The Beauty Myth

In the second chapter of the book, “Work,” Wolf examines how physical appearance, consumer culture, and the beauty myth affect women’s professional status, opportunities, and social mobility. She cites case studies of institutional discrimination targeting women because of their age or sex to link institutional discrimination to the beauty myth.

First, she argues that, since the Industrial Revolution, “women learned to understand their own beauty as part of [the consumer] economy” as it is related to marriage (20). As the emphasis on domesticity and child-rearing declined, middle- and upper-class women joined the workforce in the West. Their numbers grew steadily: from 31.8% after World War II to 53.4% in 1984 in the United States (20). The author argues that with the rise of professional women came workplace discrimination linked to looks, as it presented a way to continue legally discriminating against women. For example, workplaces could institute dress codes with specific and discriminatory policies toward women masked as an issue of professionalism.

The author briefly examines female work in different cultural and historic settings, from modern tribal societies in which women produce most of the food to 19th and 20th-century sweatshops and factories that employed lower-class women.