15/10/04

Women's Weapons Of War

Melanie Chary

Long before suffragettes shackled themselves to railings and Women's Libbers burned their bras, female freedom fighters were waging a more covert war, using lipstick, mascara and false bosoms as weapons.

Far from being instruments of oppression in a vast male conspiracy, such "beauty devices" were used by women to manipulate the judgmental masculine eye in an effort to control the uncontrollable, says feminist author Teresa Riordan.

Researching a century from Victorian corsets and bustles to the nail polish and girdles of the 1950s and Marilyn Monroe's breast implants, Riordan has written a history of the commercial inventions used by women to transform themselves.

"When successful, the artifice of Beauty is a great leveller. It puts the resourceful and the imaginative on an even playing field with the congenitally beautiful," says Riordan in her book "Inventing Beauty", published this month.

"The scrawny can appear amply endowed. The corpulent can achieve some semblance of a waist. The thin-lipped can look lusciously kissable. The wizened can project a youthful bloom."

Certain traditional feminists -- largely those who came of age in the 1960s and '70s and fought hard not to be judged on their appearance -- may be horrified by Riordan's theory that cosmetics and fashion actually empowered women.

But Riordan, a committed feminist herself, says women are no longer judged on their appearance alone and it is an accepted reality that in our western society looks are important so, if you can't choose your battleground at least seek to control it.

LIPSTICK FEMINIST

"When it comes to the opposite sex, males from many species are easily deceived. Male fireflies flirt with penlights. Male turkeys become randy at the mere sight of a fake, female turkey head. Male humans find feminine decoys equally beguiling.

"Women recognise this. And they have shrewdly, cannily and knowingly deployed artifice in their ceaseless battle to captivate the inherently roving eye of the male ... As much as it initially galled the feminist inside me to admit this, women have been the driving innovative force behind many of these inventions," she told Reuters.

According to her book, women received only 1 percent of all patents in the United States from 1850 to 1950 but two-thirds of breast-enhancement inventions were patented by women.

Riordan's book is not a study of the concept of beauty but rather the innovations and technology related to it in an age that gave birth to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Thomas Edison's light bulb and Orville and Wilbur Right's airplane.

Riordan, who spent five years studying patents, argues that it is too simplistic to say products like eye-lash curlers and hoop skirts were thought up specifically to oppress women.

"It is pejorative to say we're just the victims and not the agents to some degree in our own destiny," she said.

"Yes, there were huge constraints on women and still are. But that doesn't mean women did not imaginatively, within those boundaries, carve out their own realms of power."

SYNTHETIC LOVELINESS

The 44-year-old author and mother of three -- who was born and grew up in the American Midwest where she says her Mediterranean looks were at odds with the blonde, blue-eyed local concept of beauty -- is not alone in her opinions.

"I am a feminist and even in 1968 I always wore my lipstick and high-heels," Cisca Dresselhuys, editor of the Dutch feminist magazine "Opzij", told Reuters.

Science, technology and commerce enabled all women in western society regardless of financial status to have access to gadgets and potions that improved their appearance.

The tightly-cinched Victorian corset, the rubber "Flapper Flattener" of the 1920s and the voluptuousness of the push-up bra and cone-shaped falsies of the 1940s and 50s are all ancestors of the modern bra.

And, according to Riordan, the first false bosom was patented by New Yorker Anne McLean in 1858 -- a pair of sharply pointed wire cones inserted into the top half of a corset.

Wire falsies were replaced by rubber ones but fell out of favour quickly. "They tended to distend and deflate, rendering the bust uneven or, worse, leaving the putative breasts pointing in improbable directions," Riordan writes.

With regards to make-up, Egyptian and Indian cultures have long rimmed the eye in kohl.

But it was during the 1920s and 1930s that mascara gained renown thanks largely to the transformation it had on legendary Hollywood film star Greta Garbo, whose lashes were almost white.

Garbo's fame influenced a generation of women and by the early 1930s Maybelline mascara was available at local shops for an affordable price under the slogan: "Something beautiful happens and it can happen to you in the twinkling of an eye."

"But for mascara, Greta Garbo might have been just a chunky Swede with bad teeth," Riordan says in her book.