The *Idea*l Woman

It doesn’t take a genius to see the discrepancy between men and women throughout history in society. Women have always been at the backburner to men in all aspects of life, in particular to our study, in academia. Women were allowed to attend institutions of higher learning but had stereotypes and negative ideas pressed upon them before they even set foot on a campus. Women in academia were not taken seriously. They were cast off from respectable, or even normal, majors of study and were reduced to taking classes made exclusively for them. Before you get excited for special classes, read carefully. These classes entailed learning how to be a good housewife. Cooking, cleaning, sewing, etiquette, hosting, the list could go on and on. How fun does it sound to sit in classes for hours at time to learn how to iron a shirt just right or properly baste a roast? I thought so…

In her book College Girls, Lynn Peril explains, “women needed a specialized program, one that would not merely deal with the generalities of child psychology, for example, but should “prepare the mother to cope with a tired four-year-old, and, in addition, to get meaning out of this”…with an underlying assumption that housewife was the career that most women, if not aspired to, nonetheless found themselves in.” (Peril, 200)
Even if girls were smart and did end up studying something more stimulating than mashing potatoes, being a smart girl was viewed as tremendously unattractive. In fact, the women students were pushed to hide any intelligence at all! Being as smart as or smarter than a boy was too much for them to handle and they did not like the risk of being shown up by a girl, much less one that they were interested in dating. “Men wanted a woman who was “appreciably less intelligent than they were”.” (Peril, 212) There were even published articles in Redbook addressing dating and a woman’s intelligence. “Men are attracted to women to whom they can feel intellectually superior. They tend to marry girls whose I.Q. and educational achievements are less than their own. Indeed, investigations show that the average male has a very marked tendency to shy away from girls whom he suspects of having as many or more brains than he has.” (Peril, 212)

So at this point, men had already captured women’s capability of brainpower if any of the girls wanted to have a family or even date. Perhaps these harsh standards left no more standards to dominate women’s looks, but they were also controlled, too. If college girls wanted to be noticed and pursued by other college boys, they had a visual standard to maintain, to be the “Ideal Woman”. “According to a poll of male students at “two leading Eastern universities…the ideal wife is 5 feet 5 inches, weighs about 120 pounds, does not wear glasses, possesses sex appeal and a good figure.” (Peril, 212)

Women were to dress right, weigh a certain amount, and look sexy, yet innocent, if they desired any male attention. If these standards were not followed, a girl could wave goodbye to any social life with boys, especially since most campuses before the 1950s were not co-ed. This left girls to socialize with other girls only, unless a male specifically came to visit her due to the fact that girls were not allowed to leave campus and fraternize with a boy. Looking good was imperative.

These standards may seem crazy, but if you really focus on it, is it that much different from today? For example, there is still a looks scale placed upon women in social situations at colleges today if they want to be pursued by a boy. She still must look sexy but innocent and maintain a good figure. And for the intelligence factor, how many women are famous for their notoriously dumb phrases, attempting to accentuate the idea that she is an imbecile when it is usually the opposite. One current example of this is Jessica Simpson’s phrase about “buffalo having wings” that was so laughed at for making her appear idiotic that there are national ad campaigns playing on her ‘idiot’ success. Simpson thinks it is cute gaining laughs and attention when, in fact, it’s just an example of Master’s Tools at work, keeping her at the same standards that were used against women in the early century. Jessica doesn’t see her commercial as degrading and a way to exploit her intelligence to make a buck.

Hopefully women like Jessica Simpson will see one day the negative impact that she makes at spreading the falsity about the ‘ideal’ woman. For all the girls out there, don’t worry about being the ‘ideal’ woman. Take the ‘l’ off and you’ll see the hidden word, it’s just an ‘idea’.

-Laura Condyles