My daughter Olivia has allowed me to publish an essay she wrote. A dispatch from the frontlines of the generation now coming of age.
Twenty-first-century women are owned by their image in the same way that Victorian women were owned by their husbands and children. Although progress has been made, with women in the United States legally owning themselves upon turning 18 and only getting married and having kids if they want to, there is still a collective sense of ownership that shows itself in varying degrees of conspicuity. On the less conspicuous end of the scale are “girl” aesthetics which represent the life paths that women choose.
Before the start of World War II, it was highly stigmatized for women to work. As men started being sent overseas, however, women were called to action in the name of patriotism. The message was spread through propaganda campaigns using beautiful women as models of strength and heroism. Still today Rosie the Riveter is the most popular representation of this. Her motto was “We Can Do It!” and women around the nation felt empowered by her gamine appearance. Historians accredit that campaign as being a central contributor to the liberated woman of today. In the 1940’s she inspired women of all backgrounds to start working. Because of the circumstances, they were able to work free from much of the judgment that would have otherwise come with it, truly enjoying their responsibilities. But the workforce was not free of disparaging onlookers. Meda Brendell, a single mother who worked to support her family, got a job as a welder and said in an interview for The Library of Congress that she wouldn’t trade her time welding for anything. In the same interview, she opened up about the discrimination she faced for doing a dirty job and said that she would keep “a little bar of soap and some powder and a mirror” at her desk to preserve her femininity. After the end of the war women returned to their homes and it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that they would seriously enter the workforce.
The 21st-century woman is a girlboss: “an ambitious and successful woman (especially a businesswoman or entrepreneur)” (Mariam Webster’s Dictionary). The image of womanhood has expanded in ways that domesticated Victorian women could only have imagined. The profile of a woman stoically watering her husband’s garden that they knew is no longer the defining image of womanhood, but only one in a plethora of aesthetics for the 21st-century woman to decide between. Although this makes it seem like women have been liberated, it is actually quite the contrary because no matter what they do, they are still turned into an aesthetic that is used to describe them entirely. Instead of being a person who has a dog, likes to walk, and does business to pay the bills, they become the image of a woman who can achieve a lot, earning the label girlboss. There is no such thing as a “boyboss,” which is not because of the patriarchal origins of the word boss, but because men who achieve a lot and like to walk their dogs are just people living their lives.
The aesthetics or “cores” that describe the opportunities presented to women today don’t indicate that they are liberated, they show us that women are still trapped because they reinforce the idea that women are not their own people, they are just an aesthetic for others to consume. They are something to be experienced, not someone experiencing. There is a chapter in John Berger’s book, Ways of Seeing, about the difference between nakedness and nudes in art and in it he defines nudes, which are overwhelmingly of women, as paintings in which the naked subject is aware of being observed, saying that “She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her.” This is similar to a woman’s position in the 21st-century workplace, she is not working as she is, she is working as a woman.
The progress that has been made is not meaningless. Women are objectively more independent now than they were in the 1800s and people fight for change every day. The fact that they have the power to head the basic trajectory of their lives is a fantastic improvement, the result of decades of resistance. Thanks to the strength of people who cared, the North American collective has reached a point where women aren’t being overtly controlled in the same way they were less than one hundred years ago. It is interesting to consider, however, how Rosie the Riveter was the basis of female liberation when the most notable thing about her message was not what her story told us, but what the way she looked told us. Brenda Medal’s experience with having to prove her femininity to be seen as respectable also exemplifies the unavoidable aestheticization and resulting objectification of women. Even though some time has passed since these examples were current, this kind of thinking has not gone away, it has been hidden under the veil of supposedly uplifting aesthetics, like, but not limited to, the girlbossification of impressive women.
Good essay into a period that runs from close to my mother’s birth, (certainly my grandmothers), through mine then on to my daughters and now granddaughters. What a trajectory.
Wow so cool Olivia seems like a a thoughtful young student 👏