2015 03 Real Weddings Carli Rajs Indian

Young women inherited twenty years of the propagandizing caricature of the Ugly Feminist, so—“I’m feminine, not a feminist,” says a college senior in a Time magazine report; “I picture a many young women do not realize that others pictured “a feminist” in that way so that they would be sure to respond as this one does. Others, alarmingly, blame the women’s movement for the beauty backlash against it—“Kathryn,” a twenty-five-year-old quoted by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, describes a party at her law firm: “I often resent…the way women’s liberation has increased the expectations of men”: Twenty years ago, she complains, a young male lawyer would want to arrive with “a drop-dead blonde” on his arm, whereas today he and and his colleagues compete to escort the highest achiever—“the only catch was that these yuppie women had to look every bit as glamorous as the drop-dead blondes of the past.”

Finally, the myth seeks to discourage all young women from identifying with earlier feminists—simply because these are older women. Men grant themselves tradition to hand down through the generations; women are permitted only fashion which each season renders obsolete. Under that construct, the link between generations of women is weakened by definition: What came before is rarely held up for admiration as history or heritage, but derided by fashion’s rigid rule as embarrassingly démodé.