After more than two decades spent languishing in the gulag of the American subconscious, femininity is trying for a comeback.
The fashion industry, bulging with `50s-style crinolines and corselets, is touting it. The media are underwriting it further by heralding a return to domesticity, with stories starring former female executives who have traded their offices for kitchens and their computers for cribs. Vanna White, TV`s living Barbie Doll, is a favored contender for America`s sweetheart. And even the White House, fronted by what may be the most determinedly feminine First Lady in history, has given its blessing to a return to traditional values. Feminists, concerned over symptoms of an antifeminist backlash, cringe at the increasing use of the term ”post-feminist” to describe the decade.
Riding in on a wave of conservatism, accompanied by a revival of ruffles, manners and opulent society, this so-called return to femininity represents an ironic and confusing finish to a decade that began with the gender-bending
”new androgyny.”
It is particularly confusing because, in truth, nobody really knows what femininity should be anymore. Despite the fondest wishes of the most ardent traditionalists, few believe women are interested in abandoning the hard-won gains of the last 20 years, or, as Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown puts it, ”reverting to who we were before: simpering, eyelash-batting people.”
More to the point is the question of what women want to become. Rather than a return to femininity in the traditional sense, some observers say, it`s more likely what we`re seeing is a period of transition into something new. It has almost nothing to do with the comeback of bustles and bows and almost everything to do with an overdue struggle to arrive at a new definition of femininity, one that can integrate the best parts of our traditional and feminist past and allow us to go forward.
It will have to be a vision that deals with an array of old and new issues for women: the economic necessity of work, the biological reality of deferred motherhood, the shortage of child care and other social support structures and the frightening turn of events in the sexual revolution that began with the birth control pill in the `60s and may be ending with the AIDS scare of the `80s.
Like every historical transition, this one is not easy.
”The image that comes into my mind is a polarization,” says Felice Schwartz, president of Catalyst, a nonprofit national research and advisory organization dealing with the issues of women in the workplace. ”At one pole you have the traditional image of woman, which, as we all know, was a nurturing, supportive and charming person. That`s one pole. A new pole has been created, with a significant profile only, I think, in the last 10 years, and that`s the career woman. That`s really the opposite pole. There, you`re talking about aggressiveness, intelligence, intensity, authority and competence.
”What I think is happening, which makes the image of what is feminine blurred now, is that these two polarized perceptions of women are converging, but they haven`t converged yet.”
At the moment, femininity has arrived at a sort of conceptual crossroads, appealing most to those too young to remember its last big manifestation in the `50s and to those too old to forget. For most baby boomers, that whopping population bulge born between 1946 and 1964, the word itself is little more than a novelty, amusing but essentially irrelevant.
”The first thing that strikes me about the word is that `femininity`
used to be a man`s word, describing a woman. I think femininity in the 1950s and early 1960s was really a prison,” says Lynn Giordano, executive vice president and executive creative director of SSC&B: Lintas USA, a worldwide advertising agency. ”And the symbols for that prison were those bras you hitched yourself into and the girdles and all of the stuff that really constricted a woman. Those things made her `feminine` to someone else. It wasn`t her word.”
And with the rapid social changes of the last 20 years, American society has done its best to stamp out the word ”femininity” at its root. Spurred by the women`s movement and the legal changes it mandated, eagle-eyed word-watchers have energetically pruned our everyday nomenclature of almost any reference to gender.
Far beyond the now innocuous-sounding ”Ms.,” which once caused such a furor, men and women have been ushered into the realm of official
”personhood.” In this neutered atmosphere, such social land mines as
”chairman” can be safely sidestepped by the simple, if awkward, substitution of ”person” for the offending sexual coda. Slowly, this change in our language has altered our expectations and, thus, our perceptions of femininity and masculinity.
Think about it. Few, if any, character traits are left that automatically would be branded ”masculine” or ”feminine.” Gentleness, weakness, delicacy and modesty, all qualities accompanying the ”feminine” entry in Webster`s dictionary, have become equal-opportunity attributes.
In the workplace, fewer occupations spring to mind that remain clearly
”male” or ”female.” Even among those with longer memories, the idea of
”women`s work” has begun to fade. Sex discrimination may still exist, but it exists as a covert activity.
”Things we take for granted now were radical 15 years ago,” says Barbara Haber, curator of printed books at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College.
”Do you remember when want-ads had `male` and `female` designations? That sounds so shocking now, but the fight against it was considered radical.”
That radical edge, which characterized so many years of the women`s movement, has indeed softened in the `80s. Feminists fear that the next generation of women, having reaped the benefits of those radical years, may be slipping into premature complacency.
”We`re in a conservative period now, and it operates on many levels,”
says Haber. ”There is also a backlash on, a move on the part of highly skilled, professional women, people with MBAs, law and medical degrees, to go back home and take care of the kids.
”I don`t like the term sociobiology, but sometimes it`s a good metaphor. However, whatever the trend is, you always suddenly get a period of moving away from it. But, in fact, most people are progressively moving on, taking on careers and training their daughters to take on careers.”
”There certainly is a cultural perception that feminism is over and no longer needed,” agrees Lois Banner, professor of history and of the program for the study of women and men in society at the University of Southern California. ”My students certainly think that there`s no need for feminism. They feel that they`re just going to go into the workplace and someone`s going to give them a wonderful job and they`re going to have all these wonderful children and that someone–I don`t know who–is going to raise these children. ”They have this perception that there are not going to be any problems for them. It`s quite an alarming perception that they have.”
However, she admits, it is not a totally unexpected one. ”There are historical precedents for this. It`s kind of scary when you play with this, but every time we had a militant generation, the generation after it was not militant at all,” she says, pointing to, for example, the generation that followed suffrage pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony after the Civil War.
A similar ambivalence came after women won the vote in 1920, Banner notes. ”That was the second time it happened, and it was even worse then. You read the autobiographies of people like Margaret Mead or Lillian Hellman, and you see that there was a real reaction to the women`s movement. Suffrage is won and they`re going to pursue their individual careers and they don`t really perceive a problem. These were very astute women, but they were interested in participating in what seem to them to be individual freedoms as women.”
The same reaction is happening now, she says, ”but how far and how strong the backlash is, it`s very difficult to say. We`ve got a whole generation of young women who are very bent on careers. If, let`s say, the Supreme Court voids abortion, whether they`re going to be willing to go back to the streets over an issue like that, I don`t know.”
Moreover, according to some historians, it is hardly an accident that Americans in the `80s are attracted by the look, feel and values of the `50s. ”The neoconservatism of the 1980s is a replay of the New Conservatism of the 1950s, which itself was a replay of the New Era philosophy of the 1920s,” writes Arthur Schlesinger in his 1986 book, ”The Cycles of American Politics.”
In addition, the political conservatism of all three periods, he points out, was accompanied by a wave of ”evangelical moralism.” This led to Prohibition in the `20s, made national figures of preachers Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale in the `50s and took the form of the Moral Majority in the `80s. In all cases, such moralism encouraged an image of women as caretakers of the home and family.
Interestingly, all three periods also witnessed a revival in more provocative feminine dressing. Skirts lifted above the knees for the first time in history during the flapper era. Introduced in 1947, Dior`s New Look ushered in a period associated with ”feminine mystique” with pinched waists and full skirts.
”It was an anachronism,” according to fashion historian Colin McDowell in his Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion. ”It required corsets and padding, and it made women once more subservient to their clothes. It was successful because of its timing. Bringing back prettiness and femininity, as it did, it was eagerly taken up by nations exhausted and debilitated by war. It was a much-needed salve to their wounds.”
Such clothing, notes USC`s Banner, also represented a flirty metaphor for sex in the sexually chaste `50s. The same might be said for the current sudden burst of frivolous, happily anachronistic fashion, coming, as it does, at a time when Americans and Europeans are beset with fears about AIDS, along with terrorism and nuclear war.
What may mark the tragic finish of the sexual revolution probably will have further impact on perceptions of femininity, says novelist Margaret Atwood, author of ”The Handmaid`s Tale,” a grim story of women`s life in a future society ruled by a fundamentalist theocracy.
”Look at it this way: The more hidden and scarce a commodity is, the more titillating it is held to be. If sex was very readily available in the late `60s and early `70s, then its titillation factor was low; you could get it anywhere, like Kleenex. Now, if things are getting bottled up again, because of AIDS and various other things, then the titillation factor is going to go up. Flirtation and dating without sex are probably going to come back in,” she says.
A phenomenon of the `80s has been the wild growth of exotic lingerie. Victoria`s Secret, whose stores and catalogs were in the forefront of the boudoir approach to merchandising, has grown from 5 stores to 250 in the last three years.
”I think what`s happened over the last 10 years that`s enabled us to evolve is that women are becoming, and have become, very, very comfortable with themselves and confident with what their lives are today,” says Howard Gross, president of Victoria`s Secret. ”Our attitude is that women are doing a lot of things today to satisfy themselves versus to satisfy men, their peers or their bosses. They`re doing things purely to please themselves.”
Women are also altering their image at work. Having become more secure, they`ve begun to doff the little man`s suit, which had become a kind of corporate chador, for more flattering fare, much to the dismay of ”Dress for Success” author John Molloy. ”There`s a term for making it to a certain point and then putting on something feminine: It`s called `fluffing-out,`
” says the author of the 1977 guide to women`s business apparel. ”It`s an announcement that you don`t want to go any further, that you don`t want to be competitive anymore.”
Nonsense, says SSC&B`s Lynn Giordano. ” `Dress for Success` in the `70s was an incredible phenomenon. In the `80s, just the beginning of the 1980s, I think, women became much more comfortable with themselves. Not because I`m wearing it, but I think they finally learned that they could think and still wear pink,” she says, grinning in her rose-colored jacket.
Nevertheless, there are still real problems in the workplace that have to do with perceptions of women, particularly among older men, says Catalyst`s Felice Schwartz, whose organization also advises corporations seeking women directors.
These holdover attitudes, she says, are ”counterproductive for the employer. The male employer who is looking, let`s say, for a crackerjack salesperson, may interview a woman who has all of the characteristics that, really, in a man, we accept as necessary and laudable. However, he is still so programmed with his traditional image of women that he often will be turned off by the fact that the candidate is not consonant with his image of a woman –and he`ll forget that what he`s looking for is an able salesperson.”
Another work-related issue still to be addressed is the ”superwoman”
syndrome, which will continue to be a problem as family costs rise with the result that over half of all women are expected to be in the labor force within the decade. And the fastest-growing segment of the workforce is women with children, especially preschool children.
”That syndrome of having to be everything and, really, being nothing
–because you`re too tired–has changed,” says SSC&B`s Giordano. ”Women, I think, are starting to choose without guilt, or with less guilt. They are less afraid, I think, of the future. I think the `80s is seeing a loosening up of the should-dos.”
”What I see is that there`s been an ideal woman who is the kind who has it all,” says Radcliffe`s Haber. ”The reality is that you get tired women who are quitting their jobs, or else reasonable women who are understanding that different things have different priorities at different times. It seems to me that progressive women do exist and live their lives accordingly. You do what you can.”
Says USC`s Lois Banner: ”The real, interesting, central issue of feminism, which is very hard to address, is this: What kind of women do we want to be? On one level, I think, `God, it`s awful that we`re wearing this frilly lingerie.` On the other hand, I think, `Well, it`s really fun to role- play,` and it can be very empowering to feel very feminine, to get dressed up, to feel that you are relating to a man in a certain way.
”It`s just that too much of it is bad. Too much of it gets you back into the trap that it`s always been for women.”
