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She told her Sydney audience that fashion and beauty are portals to sisterhood and political awareness: Welteroth has been widely celebrated for commissioning stories ranging from Trump gaslighting America and abortion rights to cultural appropriation at the Coachella music festival and the difficulties of being intersex. “Beauty and style are just really great platforms to open up important conversations,” she said.
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Still, as I listened to Elaine Welteroth, the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, speak to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in June this year, it occurred to me that today’s popular feminism would be unrecognisable to many of the Miss America protesters half a century ago.įor Welteroth, an African-American former beauty editor at Teen Vogue, women’s magazines and beauty products are feminism now. The relationship of feminism to the beauty industry and women’s magazines, in other words, has a complex history. In more recent years, some have convincingly argued that beauty and fashion magazines might have been slipping feminist messages and empowering information into their pages all along. Scholars had also started to ask whether women who consumed fashion and beauty products really were all passive dupes of big corporations. As an undergraduate, I nodded along with my feminist friends reading Wolf during the day, while at night we frocked up and painted our lips to visit inner-city clubs where androgyny and queer culture were increasingly visible.Ĭelebrity figures such as Bowie, Prince and Madonna had prompted fans, as well as gender and cultural studies scholars, to ask if fashion and make-up, rather than necessarily being oppressive, could be seen in terms of play, choice and experiments around gender and sexuality. Wolf’s thesis was an important and galvanising one, but by the 1990s popular culture was in some ways outrunning popular feminism. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth argued that women’s progress in the public sphere was matched by a fashion and media industry that promoted increasingly narrow standards of physical perfection: the superwoman also had to be a supermodel. Popular magazines have as their principal raison d’être the codification and constant updating of femininity.Īnd by 1991, feminists were still linking beauty to women’s oppression. In Damned Whores and God’s Police, she wrote: In 1963, Betty Friedan had argued women’s magazines were central to creating the feminine mystique, an infantalising image of womanhood built around a myth of beautiful women in beautiful homes tending to handsome husbands and beautiful children. Carol Hanisch, a member of the New York Radical Women group behind the 1968 protest, argued later that protesters should target not the women who enter beauty contests, but “the men and bosses who imposed false beauty standards on women”. Anne Summers, writing in the newsletter MeJane in 1973, said she was abused for wearing make-up at a Women’s Liberation conference. Women’s liberationists did have their disagreements about individual choices and tactics.
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It was inspired, in part, by a protest in the US against the 1968 Miss America pageant. As Susan Magarey writes, one of the Australian Women’s Liberation movement’s first actions was a 1970 protest against Adelaide University’s “Miss Fresher” beauty contest. Second-wave feminism, to a large extent, defined itself against the beauty industry. We also played AFL with the boys during sports period, but the news from women’s liberation about make-up and women’s oppression hadn’t yet arrived at my little school in the sleepy seaside town of Sorrento.
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Once a week, during electives at primary school in 1980, I walked with a group of girls to the local hairdressing salon where we were taught how to apply eyeshadow, lipstick and smooth foundation onto our perfect skins.