59 pages • 1 hour read
Naomi WolfA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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. She also emphasizes the countless hours that women spend on housework—historically not recognized as real work until the 1960s. The share of housework in late 20th-century, two-income households still largely falls on women’s shoulders, which means that women have less leisure time than men even in industrialized societies. Wolf also cites the way physical appearance is used as a currency in the world of “professional beauties.” Historically, these professions ranged from acting and modeling to highly paid sex work.
As the question of discrimination based on sex rose in the workplace, the ideology of beauty produced a cultural lie nestled in American individuality: Beauty is considered a prerequisite for women’s success and can be achieved by anyone through hard work and determination. With this, the author believes that there is a direct link between women’s rise to positions of power and the beauty ideology of mass consumer culture. Men improve their social status through higher wages, whereas women’s social mobility is contingent on their beauty. In other words, commodified beauty is equated with wealth and status.
Wolf coins the term “PBQ”—professional beauty qualification—which is used by institutions to employ, promote, or reject women. According to the author, PBQ solidifies the double standard by undermining fair compensation as it gives employers a “reason” to pay less. PBQ also affects women psychologically, since they must contend with being undervalued and underpaid by factors beyond their control. Indeed, sex work and fashion are “the only professions in which women consistently earn more than men” (50). Wolf asserts that PBQ led to the rise of elective cosmetic surgery and compares such surgery to historic tattooing and branding. Finally, rather than fostering female solidarity, women are taught to compete with each other and feel isolated as a result.
The author uses examples to highlight the predominance of PBQ. In one example, Margarita St. Cross was fired from her job as a Playboy waitress because “she had lost her Bunny Image” (31). In contrast, men employed in the same fields and cities were not subject to these kinds of appraisals. The author uses the stereotypical case of a mature, male news anchor and a much younger, attractive, female presenter on television to illustrate the difference. Christine Craft—a news anchor and lawyer—received publicity for raising the question of discrimination based on age and gender in this context.
Overall, beauty criteria make standard employment disputes subjective, and employers who use such criteria tend to be unpenalized. Wolf believes that PQE is a way around Title IX protections, which banned gender-based discrimination in American education, as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of the 1970s. The beauty myth led to vague and arbitrary assumptions about the way professional women should look: feminine enough to be attractive, but not too feminine to be considered “asking for it” when it comes to sexual harassment at work. Although sexual harassment is pervasive, Wolf states that it is difficult for victims to get their aggressors to stop.
Wolf considers the professional realm an important battlefield regarding women’s rights. Issues include effectively dealing with sexual harassment at work and addressing the gender wage gap. The gap began to close in the 1960s, but women still earn less than men, the author argues. The beauty myth, on the other hand, is an effective method to prevent women from professional advancement based on merit. It uses vague or contradictory ways of judging women on their appearance and links this appearance to perceived behavior, as well as their self-worth.
At the same time, Wolf does not address important workplace issues such as the lack of adequate, federal maternity leave for women in the United States. Maternity leave (and sometimes paternity leave) exists not only in Europe and Canada but also in many developing, less prosperous countries. Wolf discusses the importance of reproductive rights and abortion but does not address the choice to be a mother. Just as women are penalized for not abiding by beauty codes, many are professionally punished for staying home with a young child, experiencing decreased wages and career stagnation.
The author also examines women’s mass entry into the workforce, which depended on the war economies of World Wars I and II. After each war, there was a return to domesticity for many reasons, from giving jobs to male war veterans to the baby boom after World War II. Despite being aware of the ways women’s roles in the professional sphere depended on capitalist production, Wolf does not analyze the systemic nature of this economic system and the social relations that arise because of it. Wolf also does not examine the decline of economic conditions that led to two-income households being an economic necessity. Economic and social conditions create circumstances in which working is a necessity rather than women choosing to simultaneously be full-time workers and full-time mothers. “Doing it all” has been used to police women’s behavior in workforces and at home, placing the onus of excelling under oppressive conditions on the individual and discouraging pushes for social change.
The transformation of women’s roles from the pre-Modern period to the late 20th century also roughly fits Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy is depicted as a pyramid, the bottom of which is taken up by necessities such as food, shelter, and safety, and the top features self-actualization and transcendence. The model has faced some criticism, such as the apparent link between financial resources and the psychological state of fulfillment. Nonetheless, the hierarchy is relevant here in the sense that in the late 20th century, ordinary women began to address more complex psychological needs beyond basic survival. When women started to focus on education and professional, merit-based accomplishments, the beauty myth was introduced. With this, the psychological ramifications of the beauty myth are important as a way to stifle women’s self-actualization.