Two images of women have been dominant throughout U.S. history. The first is one of innocence and spirituality, in line with the "Virgin Mary" or madonna figure of Christian belief. The second is one of sexuality and evil, in line with the "Eve" figure of Judeo-Christian belief or the Pandora of classical mythology. (In the Garden of Eden story, Eve took the apple from the serpent and persuaded Adam to eat it. In the Pandora tale, Pandora opened the jar that unleashed evil upon the world.) A third image is one of women as devoted wives and housekeepers, in keeping with the medieval "patient Griselda," who endured an abusive husband without complaint, or the more active "Betsy Ross" of the American Revolution, who demonstrated loyalty to home and country by sewing the nation's flag.
The virgin/whore dichotomy is an example of the tendency of Euro-American thought toward dualistic categorization (good/evil, beauty/ugliness, man/woman, black/white). The spirituality/sexuality dualism also reflects Western hierarchies of class, race, and gender, which have been connected with the venerable "double standard" of sexual behavior. (Under the "double standard," men are allowed a sexual freedom denied "proper" women.) This gender differentiation has often linked female purity to male honor as the primary guarantee of patrimony, while until the late nineteenth century, women were catalogued as the property of fathers and husbands. Thus the "fallen woman" historically was beyond respectability, women were held responsible for rapes perpetrated on them, and prostitution was considered necessary to service male sexual needs.
Nineteenth-century Victorianism reversed prevailing belief to designate women as asexual. Its corresponding image of heightened spirituality for mainstream women undergirded an ethic of inferiority, dependency, and femininity. These qualities were reflected in the period's cult of thinness for women and its confining dress, which included long skirts, tightly bound waists, and a bell-shaped body outline. But stigmatizing sexuality only provoked its return sub rosa. Thus prostitution flourished, while burlesque and music-hall actresses with large hips and bosoms became symbols of ideal beauty. The preference among immigrant and upwardly mobile groups for plumpness in women as an indication of prosperity combined with the campaign of doctors against extreme thinness and tight-lacing corsets to make weight fashionable among women by the mid-nineteenth century. For a time, fat was considered beautiful.
By 1920 women's increasing participation in education, the professions, and sports undermined Victorianism, creating both new freedoms and restrictions. Sexuality became more open and clothing more comfortable; the virgin/whore dichotomy blurred somewhat. Concurrently, advertising and the consumer culture replaced Victorianism as a primary means of control. The advertising industry found avenues for female objectification through images in magazines, the movies, and other media. It created public demand through arousing both sexual desires for products and personal insecurities about such matters as status and appearance. Thus thinness came back in vogue, and women took up wearing cosmetics, previously associated with prostitution.
Social class played a role in defining the image of beauty for women in the 1920s, especially with the vogue for tanned skin. For centuries darkened skin had been negatively associated with laborers and peasants working out of doors. In the eighteenth century fashionable European women painted their skin white, while in the nineteenth century they wore bonnets and carried parasols to avoid the sun. The pallor representative of those who worked in mines, factories, and office buildings undermined the association between darkened skin and low social rank. Widely publicized accounts of well-to-do people tanning themselves on beaches delivered the final blow. Yet some historians contend that the trend of tanning resulted from the popularity of Black entertainer Josephine Baker and the general fascination with Blacks engendered by the popularity of Harlem nightclubs and jazz joints during the 1920s.
Despite the tanning vogue, "black" and "white" designations of skin color were sharply dichotomized. This continues to be the case even though the sexual exploitation of Black women in the South produced a large mulatto population, as did that of Spaniards with Indians as a result of the conquest of Latin America. In Hawaii, where whites are a minority, distinctions based on skin color have been reduced. In Puerto Rico, with a large mixed population, categories of browns and Indians also exist.
In terms of image, the dominant culture has often sexualized the "other," seeing a perverse exoticism in persons of differing classes, nationalities, and races. In addition, the stringent work ethic of middle-class capitalism, with its implicit disapproval of pleasure, contributed to redefining those outside its confines as possessed by an appealing—or appalling—freedom in lifestyle. This sexual stereotyping has been applied to ethnic and racial minorities primarily as a means of denigration and control. Thus Black women were catalogued as Sapphires, as slavewomen consumed by lust, even after the Civil War brought emancipation. Asian women have been viewed in terms of "Tokyo Rose," the shadowy figure who broadcast undermining sexual innuendos to U.S. troops during the Second World War. For Latin American and Mexican women, the figure of the dancing "Carmen" flinging her body as the prostitute/bar girl with hot "Latin" blood was the degraded sexualized image. The image for Native American women was the "squaw," a woman so driven by her sexuality that she freely cohabited with white men.
The obverse of these sexualized images has not been one of spirituality: the virgin/whore dichotomy breaks down when applied to women of color. The absence of the claim to spirituality has caused problems for women attempting to assert respectability in a middle-class world where morality matters. Rather, the spiritual side of the divide has been replaced by an image of submission. For Black women, beside Sapphire stands the "mammy" of Southern slavery and the Aunt Jemima figure of the modern age. These rotund, simple, and motherly images have greater loyalty to the white families they serve than to their own race. Recent historians contend that the slave mammy was a fiction invented by the white South to justify slavery. Aunt Jemima was an advertiser's creation to sell a pancake mix. All historical studies of domestic servants, Southern or Northern, conclude that they were grossly exploited.
Among women of color, the image of Native American women has upon occasion involved spirituality, in an extension of the eighteenth-century "noble savage" typology. This image emerged when Northern Europeans first encountered the North American continent and visualized its Indian inhabitants as exemplars of the purity of the natural man, untouched by the corruptions of civilization. This image was perpetuated by the story of Pocahontas, the noble Native American woman who supposedly rescued John Smith from death in colonial Virginia. Correspondingly, Native American tribal groups hold to a more spiritualized concept of beauty in women, in line with their connection to the natural world.
Mexican and Latin American women, predominantly Catholic, had their own virgin/whore dichotomy in the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother protector and symbol of female virtue, and La Malinche, the Aztec noblewoman who was given to Cortés as a slave and who became his lover. Although La Malinche has traditionally been denigrated as the mother-whore who created a mixed Spanish race, Latina and Mexican feminist revisionists are redefining her as a woman who survived through using her strength and cunning.
Throughout U.S. history, the idealized mainstream images of women have often been young, representing the stage of life associated with purity, innocence, and sexuality. In the twentieth century, the young woman has been a symbol used by advertisers to promote cosmetic products that have no intrinsic value aside from adornment and to create consumer identifications with brand names of otherwise indistinguishable products.
Correspondingly, aging women have been demonized as witches and menopausal hags, trivialized as grandmothers baking cookies and crocheting, and stylized as laughable figures clutching to lost youth. By the early twentieth century, however, such overriding images of aging women were contested because women were living longer and were healthier than men. Advances in life expectancy, in addition to women's movement into public and reform activity, contributed to what was widely viewed by the second decade of the twentieth century as a "renaissance" of aging women. Public individuals such as Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Mead, whose vigor and achievements in later life were praised and publicized, also helped to undermine the negative stereotype.
Still, the wisdom of aging women, prized in traditional cultures, has historically been dismissed as "old wives' tales." It is still not widely known that women and men in both Asian and Native American cultures will add years to their life span when asked their age, so prized is the wisdom and strength of age in these cultures.
Images of women also reflect homophobia. Until the late nineteenth century, no category of gender identification named "lesbian" existed, since before then, sex was considered impossible without a phallic component. Late-nineteenth-century sexologists refuted this view but defined lesbians as men in women's bodies. This contributed to the common stereotyping of lesbians as "dykes," creatures with no claim to femininity or spirituality. Still, lesbians themselves often took on the identity of a masculinized "butch" or a feminized "femme"—whether to mimic or to satirize dominant cultural attitudes. More recent generations of lesbians, living in a less repressive climate, have tended toward less stylized behaviors.
The radical movements of the 1960s, explicitly countercultural in dress and behavior, contested many stereotypes of women. In response, recycled images of women that drew from old categorizations resurfaced. The emaciated, childlike "Twiggy" was the 1960s supermodel, and her appearance created a fad of extreme thinness that has lasted to the present. It has brought in its wake an epidemic of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, as young women strive to be ever thinner. Moreover, as much as women may exercise to achieve strong bodies, in line with feminist ideals of appearance, they also reshape those bodies surgically to achieve large bosoms and thin waists. In the process they resort to such medical procedures as breast implants and liposuction (the removal of fatty deposits by a vacuum suction surgical method).
What has this meant for physically challenged women, a group historically shunned by mainstream culture as outside normal womanhood? Vigorous lobbying on their part has brought laws according them equal access to public space. Through athletic contests and some sympathetic television portrayals, they have gained public recognition. But these successes have not translated into public acceptance as personal and sexual equals.
Among Western binary categorizations of women, a primary one has been between beauty (associated with youth, innocence, and perfection) and ugliness (associated with what is different and "imperfect"). The recent trend toward reshaping bodies according to an image of "perfection" not only reinforces the "beauty/ugliness" duality but also poses a special threat to physically challenged women and to all women who choose to retain their natural appearance.
The old dichotomy between women as madonnas or whores may have broken down, only to be replaced by a new one directly based on physical appearance. This new dualism is furthered not only by advertisers but also by doctors seeking profits in the consumer-oriented culture of the United States in the late 1990s. Generational conflict has also surfaced, as young women define themselves as "postfeminist" and exert the right to define their own appearance, even if the media both manipulate and control it.
What do we make of a youth icon such as the singer-actress Madonna? On the one hand, by flaunting her sexuality in the context of lesbian and interracial images, she seems to defy centuries of sexist stereotyping and to validate trends affirming positive images of all women. On the other hand, defining freedom as primarily sexual hardly addresses issues of race, class, and economic oppression for women that are still endemic in the United States today.
Lois W. Banner
See also
Stereotypes.
