Early Observations About Beauty in Major Texts of Feminist Theory

Early radical feminist writings predated and helped fuel the early political protests just described. Again, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and then later in works including Kate Millett's Sexual

Politics , Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex , and Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey ,^[97] one finds beauty treated not as an independent topic but as inseparable from a broader feminist worldview . One surmises that de Beauvoir deliberately chose not to devote a separate chapter of The Second Sex to "beauty" and "looks." Rather, what we have been calling looks-ism is intricately woven into the fabric of her analysis, in accordance with her general phenomenological views regarding objectified relations and the enculturated demand that women develop a passive "femininity." Similarly, Millett, Firestone, Atkinson, and other theorists showed little interest in analyzing beauty as an isolated issue. Once more, beauty was seen as specifically manifesting the objectification of women broadly conceived; it involved particular psychic and social practices through which women's freedom became limited.