Abstract
By the time the women who worked as copywriters at J. Walter Thompson (JWT) graduated from college, they had already been exposed to a relentless focus on the female body. In securing a place in academia, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were subject to extreme bodily surveillance by parents, college administrators and faculty, and physicians. This surveillance carried on the tradition of a monitored and regulated female body through a Victorian “cult of domesticity” and “true womanhood” that insisted on female demureness in the public sphere for middle-class women.
If people of color ruled the world, white people would curl their hair and darken their skin.
—Chandler Owen, editor of the Messenger1
Among the Nigerian Wodaabes, the women hold economic power and the tribe is obsessed with male beauty; Wodaabe men spend hours together in elaborate makeup sessions, and compete—provocatively painted and dressed, with swaying hips and seductive expressions—in beauty contests judged by women.
—Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.
—“The Beauty Business: Pots of Promise,” The Economist, May 22, 2003
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Notes
Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873),
quoted in Margaret A. Lowe, Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1–2, 15–16.
Ibid., 164. This term wasn’t used until 1934, when psychologist Paul Schilder attempted to define the concept of body image. See Paul Schilder, “Localization of Body Image,” Proceedings of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease 13, no. 5 (1934): 466, cited in Lowe.
In Foucault’s theory of surveillance, the panopticon is a model prison that induces a “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power … the prisoner is constantly observed by an inspector.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–228.
Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001), 3.
Lois Banner, American Beauty: A Social History … Through Two Centuries of the American Idea, Ideal, and Image of the Beautiful Woman (Los Angeles: Figueroa, 2005).
Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
See Banta, Imaging American Women; Banner, American Beauty; and Umberto Eco, ed., History of Beauty (New York: Rizzoli, 2004).
Creative Staff Meeting Minutes, May 25, 1932, JWT Archives, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina. Also see Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
“Sales in the United States,” Account History Files, Lever Brothers, JWT Archives, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina; Robert Lovett, “Francis A. Countway and ‘The Lever Way,’” Harvard Library Bulletin 18, no. 1 (1970): 84–93; Ellen Gartrell, “More About the Lever Brothers Lux Collection,” JWT Archives Web site: Emergence of Advertising in America, http://library.duke.edu.digitalcollections/eaa/lver.html (accessed April 22, 2009).
Roland Marchand’s concept of social tableaux is based on ad images in which “people are depicted in such a way as to suggest their relationship to each other or to a larger social structure.” These scenes, however, only reflect “one very narrow stratum of American society.” Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 166.
Mireille. French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Daphne Brooks, in Noliwe Rooks’s Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture that Made Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 17.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: Morrow, 1991), 7.
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© 2009 Denise H. Sutton
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Sutton, D.H. (2009). “Good Looks Supremacy”. In: Globalizing Ideal Beauty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100435_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100435_3
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