What Can Women's Hands Do?

Women's magazines of the 1940s and 1950s featured many ads showing women's hands (and thus creating an entire category of work for "hand models")—graceful hands with perfect nails, doing mostly domestic chores, and in some cases, shopping. Though today’s most popular women’s magazines rarely, if ever, feature “hand models,” I wondered whether they imply that women’s hands should still do the same things as they did sixty years ago. Or, do these publications somehow convey a broader idea of what work women might do with their hands—brain surgery, technical work, sculpture, farming . . . I wasn’t sure what to expect.

So, I picked up early 2008 issues of Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, Woman’s Day, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Quilting, and Family Circle. I didn’t even need to consult the ads, because now, many articles are “advertorials,” rolling content and advertising into numerous short, mind-numbing chunks. Sorry, ladies. According to the bland, white world of women’s print media, the main purpose of your hands is still to cook, clean, polish, wash, do needlework, and shop.

What are you waiting for? Take off your gloves, buy the recommended products, and get to work!

Hooray (?!) for Hollywood

With the Academy Awards coming up in just a few days, it might be fascinating to look at the Best Actress categories over the decades, to see what kind of archetypes, stereotypes, professions, or lack thereof, the leading actresses portrayed. Movies are such cultural barometers that I expect we’ll find some interesting trends here. I’m going to look at eight years, in each decade starting from 1938, so that I can end with 2008’s winners. I’ll list the nominees in this category, and briefly describe the woman’s role in the film. The first name in each set is the winner for that year. Thanks to Wikipedia for making this information so easy to research!

1938
Bette Davis - Jezebel, as Julie Marsden (a strong-willed southern belle)
Fay Bainter - White Banners, as Hannah Parmalee (a peddler)
Wendy Hiller - Pygmalion, as Eliza Doolittle (another peddler made over into a fine lady)
Norma Shearer - Marie Antoinette, as Marie Antoinette (the French Queen)
Margaret Sullivan - Three Comrades, as Patricia 'Pat' Hollmann (the tubercular love object of three German soldiers)

1948
Jane Wyman - Johnny Belinda, as Belinda McDonald (a deaf girl who is raped)
Ingrid Bergman - Joan of Arc, as Joan of Arc (the sainted teen warrior)
Olivia de Havilland - The Snake Pit, as Virginia Stuart Cunningham (the wife of a financier, who finds herself committed to an “insane asylum”
Irene Dunne - I Remember Mama, as Martha 'Mama' Hanson (a loving mother)
Barbara Stanwyck - Sorry, Wrong Number, as Leona Stevenson (a spoiled, bedridden millionaire’s daughter)

1958
Susan Hayward - I Want to Live! as Barbara Graham (a prostitute and drug addict convicted of murder)
Deborah Kerr - Separate Tables, as Sibyl Railton-Bell (the meek daughter of a manipulative mother)
Shirley MacLaine - Some Came Running, as Ginnie Moorehead (a poor “bad girl” with a heart of gold)
Rosalind Russell - Auntie Mame, as Mame Dennis (the eccentric aunt of an orphaned nephew)
Elizabeth Taylor - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as Margaret 'Maggie the Cat' Pollitt (a striving wife)

1968
Barbra Streisand - Funny Girl, as Fanny Brice and Katharine Hepburn - The Lion in Winter, as Eleanor of Aquitaine (tie) - Barbra as the film star and comedienne Fanny Brice and Katherine as one of the most powerful women in the Middle Ages
Patricia Neal - The Subject Was Roses, as Nettie Cleary (mother of a troubled WWII soldier)
Vanessa Redgrave - Isadora, as Isadora Duncan (the flamboyant dancer)
Joanne Woodward - Rachel, Rachel, as Rachel Cameron (a repressed schoolteacher)

1978
Jane Fonda - Coming Home, as Sally Hyde (a veteran’s hospital nurse who falls for an injured vet)
Ingrid Bergman - Autumn Sonata, as Charlotte Andergast (a world famous pianist paying the price for having neglected her children)
Ellen Burstyn - Same Time, Next Year, as Doris (a housewife who meets the same man once a year for more than two decades for an affair)
Jill Clayburgh - An Unmarried Woman, as Erica (a spurned wife who finds work, liberation, and happiness)
Geraldine Page - Interiors, as Eve (an interior designer left by her husband and neglected by her daughters)

1988
Jodie Foster - The Accused, as Sarah Tobias (a working class girl who is gang raped)
Glenn Close - Dangerous Liaisons, as Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (a manipulative 18th-century marquise)
Melanie Griffith - Working Girl, as Tess McGill (a secretary who works her way to the top)
Meryl Streep - A Cry in the Dark, as Lindy Chamberlain (a religious mother accused of killing her baby)
Sigourney Weaver - Gorillas in the Mist, as Dian Fossey (a biopic of the American zoologist)

1998
Gwyneth Paltrow - Shakespeare in Love, as Viola De Lesseps (the daughter of a wealthy merchant who disguises herself as a boy so she can star in a play)
Cate Blanchett - Elizabeth, as Elizabeth I (yet another depiction of the powerful Queen of England)
Fernanda Montenegro - Central do Brasil, as Dora (an embittered old woman)
Meryl Streep - One True Thing, as Kate Gulden (a cancer-stricken mother)
Emily Watson - Hilary and Jackie, as Jacqueline du Pré (biopic of a British cellist whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis)

2008 (winner not yet determined at this date)
Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married, as Kym (a recovering drug addict coming home for her sister’s wedding)
Angelina Jolie - Changeling, as Christine Collins (a single mother in 1928 whose son goes missing)
Melissa Leo - Frozen River, as Ray Eddy (a desperate single mother who gets involved in human trafficking)
Meryl Streep - Doubt, as Sister Aloysius Beauvier (a nun)
Kate Winslet - The Reader, as Hanna Schmitz (a Nazi guard)

What stands out for me is that, with the exception of biopics, where the actress is portraying a historic or inspirational character, their roles are very often mainly defined by their relationships to others—mothers, wives, daughters, lovers, victims. In a couple of cases here, if a mother is more defined by her profession, as in the case with 1978’s Autumn Sonata and Interiors, she pays a heavy price for alienating her family. Outside the family fold are roles of queens, prostitutes, general “bad girls” who either stay bad or go good, nuns. Few interesting professions or even adventures. The roles that go outside conventional narratives are usually based on real women, like zoologist Dian Fossey and dancer Isabella Duncan. In years not covered here, there are biographical films of Erin Brockovich, Camille Claudel, and Isak Dinesen, among others, depicting outside-the-box female lives. It’s as if screenwriters can’t begin to imagine fictional roles for women outside the standard narratives.

Best Actor Roles are filled with flawed men defined more by what they do than their relationships with others. There are businessmen, lots of boxers and soldiers, musicians, criminals, lawyers, spies, cops. Movies with strong (even if flawed, like Erin Brockovich) female protagonists are rare—just as rare today as ever. And two new popular movies (not Oscar caliber by any means), Bride Wars and He’s Just Not That Into You, play on tired female stereotypes.

I’d love to hear some recommendations for good films with strong female protagonists. I’d like to recommend, believe it or not, Little Women (1994), with Wynona Ryder playing Jo March, an autobiographical depiction of the book’s author, Louisa May Alcott; and My Brilliant Career, also a semiautobiographical film about the Australian (female) author Miles Franklin.

Best-Selling Women

Daphne Du Maurier

In troubled economic times, books and movies are necessary forms of comfort and escape. I’ll be doing a couple of posts about movies in the weeks ahead as we head toward the Academy Awards; but now I’m going to look at what Americans were reading during the 1930s—the era of the Great Depression, and which of the bestselling books of that decade were written by women.

As everyone knows, what makes it to the best seller lists these days is not necessarily what endures and is most often not literature. I had no idea what to expect when I explored the lists of top 10 best selling novels for each of the years of the 1930s, but what I did find floored me! At least forty percent of the 100 top selling novels of that decade were by women authors, and of those, many have endured and have indeed become classics. Others were by authors whose names are perhaps less familiar now, but who continue to be well regarded, and perhaps now underappreciated. Ellen Glasgow is one of them.

Take 1931. The #1 selling novel is The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. At #2 is Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather. The #3, #4, and #5 novels were also by women, but whose names were not familiar to me. #5 was Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes. This won the year’s Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. The following year, The Good Earth remained at the top spot, and Pearl Buck also occupied the third spot with another novel titled Sons.

In the years to come, the names that grace the top-selling fiction list, both male and female, are literary legends: Isak Dinesen, Edna Ferber, Rebecca West, Daphne Du Maurier, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. And get this: Virginia Woolf made the list in 1937 for The Years. Do you think that, with its dense, complex language, a Virginia Woolf novel would make it to today’s best seller list? I would bet against it. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was the #1 novel both in 1936 and 1937.

Just to give the men their due, some of the names on the 1930s lists include Aldous Huxley, Thornton Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and George Santayana.

I don’t think that there’s a dearth of good fiction these days, but the best novels are not necessarily those that are read by the public in droves. What makes it onto the top-selling lists is awash with formula fiction by both men and women. I went through the list of top 10 novels for each of the years 2000 through 2008. Compared to the 1930s, what a letdown!

The percentage of the top-selling novels by women is less than 25%. Taken as the sheer number of women, it would probably be even less, since a few of the women appear multiple times—Patricia Cornwall, Janet Evanovich, and, sigh, Danielle Steele. Cornwall and Evanovich write crime/mystery novels, and I haven’t read any, so I can’t be judgmental, but it seems safe to say that they will not be handed down to future generations as classics. By the way, women authors are currently an even smaller minority on the non-fiction bestseller lists than they are on the fiction lists. Some of their bestselling male counterparts who appear multiple times on the 2000-2008 lists include Clive Cussler, John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, and Tom Clancy. Lots of formula fiction from both female and male authors.

Notably absent from this decades lists was J.K. Rowling, due to some “rule” made about who can or can’t be on the list. No doubt, she has been the top selling female author of this decade, or indeed any decade. Of all the books on the current lists, I would bet that she would be the one of the only, if not the only, authors whose works will endure.

The few non-formulaic female authors appearing on this decade’s list include Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones, one of my least favorite books), and Sue Monk Kidd (Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, both of which underwhelmed me). No one is nearly in the league of Virginia Woolf or Isak Dineson, and no books are nearly as compelling as the more accessible yet wonderfully written Rebecca or Gone with the Wind. We can’t entirely blame the publishing industry for this. They give the public what they want. It’s painfully apparent that the paths of literature and commercial fiction are nearly completely divergent.

I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this post!

Tough Times for Mistresses

A mistress in better times: Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764), mistress of King Louis XV of France

Last week the New York Times ran an article titled It’s the Economy, Girlfriend. It centered on a social group in NYC of mainly young women in their mid-to-late twenties who have formed a support group they call Dating a Banker Anonymous. They meet once or twice a week to commiserate over the Wall Street banking fallout and how it affects their relationships with their hard-charging, alpha-male boyfriends. Or ex-boyfriends, or married boyfriends. In addition, they’ve started a blog they bill as “free from the scrutiny of feminists.”

As the article states, they invite like-minded gals to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.” I have no idea what “bottle service” is, and the owners of this blog claim that much of it is tongue-in-cheek (though it doesn't come off that way). Bottom line: said alpha males are losing great chunks of their income, if not their jobs altogether, and thus, apparently lose their appeal.

The girlfriends, as they bill themselves, are clearly disappointed over what they are no longer getting, from vacations, to gifts, to regular sex and/or attention. Are these girls, in the traditional sense of the word, mistresses? Dictionary.com defines “mistress” as a woman “who has a continuing, extramarital sexual relationship with one man, esp. a man who, in return for an exclusive and continuing liaison, provides her with financial support.” Taking out the word “extramarital” these Dating a Banker girls seem to fit the definition. I suppose many of them hope that the banker boyfriends will eventually become husbands (that is, if they can keep their jobs and bonuses), but these gals are clearly in it for richer, not for richer or poorer.

Perhaps investment banking (at least as we once knew it; good riddance!) and high-stakes trading are still male bastions, but if these smart, educated like money so much, WTF don’t they at least try to make more of it themselves? Most of them hold “glamour” jobs, something to do until a ring is slipped on their fingers. Most of the girls in this group are dating (or have broken up with) single guys; a few are seeing or are on the outs with married men. Apparently some wealthy men are finding that it’s too costly to maintain a wife and a mistress in these trying financial times (violins, please).

Mistress: Such an old-fashioned word, such a dated concept. Why do these young women want to perpetuate it?

Underrepresented

A few nights ago I saw a story on the evening news about the upcoming elections in Iraq. Though I opposed this costly and violent war from the start, there was something quite bracing about the courage of those running for office. Specifically, that there are so many women seeking to be representatives in the highest legislative body. A recently enacted law in Iraq requires that at least 25 percent of each party in office must be made up of women.

So, how do we compare in our time-honored democracy, as compared with the fledgling one in Iraq? The U.S. House of Representatives has 435 members. As of last year’s elections, there are 74 women serving (17%). There are currently 17 women in the senate (also 17%), an all-time high, so at least that’s good news. So in total, of the 535 senators and congresspeople, 17% are women. Not such good news.

Fascinating facts:

• Hillary’ Clinton’s run for president in 2008 was considered a really big deal, often described as “historic.” However, 59 women from 45 countries have served as presidents, prime ministers, or chancellors around the globe. Currently, there are 14 countries led by women. Not a huge number, granted, but one not often acknowledged by American media.


• Jeanette Rankin of Montana was the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives, elected in 1917. Montana and a few other states gave women the right to vote before passage of the amendment that gave all women the right to vote in 1920.


• Hattie Caraway of Tennessee was the first woman elected to the U.S Senate (another had been appointed, and served very briefly, before her) in 1922.


• Margaret Chase Smith of Maine served in both the House and the Senate (1949-1973) and was the first woman of a major party to run in the presidential primary (Republican) in 1964.


• Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president (Equal Rights Party) in 1873. Though considered a fringe candidate, and spent election night jailed, she brought a great deal of attention to the cause.

Whenever women do anything significant in American politics, the media somehow leads us to believe that new ground is being broken, ignoring both history and the rest of the world. Getting back to Iraq, even though their law requires that 25% of their legislative body is female, it isn’t clear whether that will actually come to pass; we’ll find out in the next few days. Still, it's humbling that in Iraq, where repression and discrimination are so prevalent, the aspiration to increase female representation is such a publicly stated goal.

Nothing to Wear

A reader who left a comment on the previous post wrote that she loves the feminine fashions of the 50s depicted in this blog. So do I. In fact, a few of my most treasured clothing items are from that era. I have a little cropped jacket from the 1940s that will be with me until I take my last breath. The covered buttons, the padded shoulders, the subtle gathers at the waist make it a real classic. The workmanship and detail in yesteryear’s clothing will never again be matched.

Well-dressed women in the late 19th century, it has been recorded, may have worn more than 35 pounds worth of clothing in wintertime! More than half of that weight hung from the waist. A woman could do some serious resistance training just walking around, were it not for the unhealthy, constricting corset. According to an article by Dorothy Hartman, corsets could put as much as “22 pounds of pressure on internal organs. Long term results of wearing the undergarment included fractured ribs, collapsed lungs, displacement of the liver and uterine prolapse. Physicians rallied around the idea that corsets compressed the genitals, thus weakening the woman’s ability to bear children.”

Women's clothing did come a long way by the 1920s. Women were freed from these constricting fashions, with shorter skirts, looser clothing, and even trousers. Summer fashions were breezy and flowing, and in winter, practicality reigned with jackets, capes, trousers and hats with more man-tailored but still flattering looks. For me, no era beats the 1940s and 1950s for women’s clothing that was as practical as it was beautiful. Think of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca; Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (though of course they had the height and classic figures to look good in anything). And the clothing in all my 1940s-1950s magazines just makes me so envious. It’s not easy to find the really good stuff in vintage outlets.Where is it all? My theory is that all those lovely beaded wool sweaters were eaten by moths. Anyone with any tips, send them my way!

Women’s clothing from the mid-20th century was feminine yet classy. You don’t see the kind of cheesy fabrics and absurd daytime decolletage so prevalent today. For example, former President Bush’s former press secretary, Dana Perino, was recently on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart wearing what looked like a cheap bright red prom dress, really low cut in a non-flattering way and you just wonder, what was she thinking? I’d like the pendulum to swing back to the detailed, feminine, yet non-revealing styles of the mid-20th century (OK, with the exception of the hideous shirtwaist dresses like those worn by TV moms like June Cleaver and Donna Reed), but that, I’m afraid, will remain a fantasty.

Magazine Mamas

I have a nice little collection of women’s magazines from the 1930s through the 1950s. In that era, especially those of the pre-televsion age, magazines held a lot of sway as the primary conduit between advertisers and consumers. We tend to look back at that era as a time when a woman’s home was her universe—a view that's far too simplistic.

A comparison of women’s magazines from those decades to similar ones of the present day favors the former for intelligent content. Sure, the magazines of yesteryear focused mainly on domestic issues—marriage, motherhood, cooking, home decorating—but they also contained idea-filled articles and as many as a half dozen dense, wordy pieces of short fiction. These stories, though mostly, but not always, with a romantic theme, were solidly written and their contributors were occasionally literary stars—I noted stories by Shirley Jackson, Pearl Buck, and Rebecca West.

Every issue, whether Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, or others, offered at least a few articles on pithy topics. Here are a few examples:

- "Marie Curie, My Mother" by Eve Curie (book excerpt about the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, and then later in chemistry, by her daughter, an author and journalist—her other daughter, Irene, also won a Nobel Prize in chemistry) - Ladies Home Journal, 1938

- "The Kinsey Institute Report on Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion" (can you think of any woman’s magazine today that would touch this topic with a ten-foot pole? The advertisers would be aghast!) - McCalls, 1956

- "Why do Women Vote the Way they Do?" (an in-depth look at women’s political opinions and affiliations) - Woman’s Home Companion, 1956

Waiting in a doctor’s office last week, I had a chance to peruse the contents of the top women’s magazines(such as Redbook, Good Housekeeping, LHJ, and the like) and without a doubt, their offerings are much thinner than their counterparts of the past. There are few actual articles, and those that are of any significant length are either celebrity interviews or trite tips on how to improve your marriage and/or marital sex. Many of the so-called “features” are merely advertorials.

Women’s magazines, past and present, assume an extremely narrow narrative for what a woman’s life looks like. You are generally white, married, and have a couple of kids, and most of the articles and ads are geared toward that scenario. No one has a female partner, or a lover named Eduardo, or a twice-married boyfriend with some addiction problem, or is, heaven forbid, single. Did you know that about half of adult women in the U.S. are single? Of course, for young single women there are magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour, which are mainly about shopping, beauty, and attracting the right man.

Bottom line: even in the 1940s and 1950s, when the cultural paradigm was even narrower than it is today, magazines offered far more thought provoking, well-crafted, lengthy articles and stories than they do today. This is definitely an area where we've not come a long way, and in fact, have regressed!