“
When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman (that’s my order of
priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her) puts on black
suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential professor
to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to
herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by
taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental
one? Does her hand shape the lipstick into a cupid’s bow in a gesture
of free will?
She doesn’t have to do it.
That is the response the beauty myth would like a woman to have,
because then the Other Woman is the enemy. Does she in fact have to
do it?
The aspiring woman does not have to do it if she has a choice. She
will have a choice when a plethora of faculties in her field, headed by
women and endowed by generations of female magnates and robber
baronesses, open their gates to her; when multinational corporations
led by women clamor for the skills of young female graduates; when
there are other universities, with bronze busts of the heroines of half a
millennium’s classical learning; when there are other research-funding boards maintained by the deep
coffers provided by the revenues of female inventors, where half the
chairs are held by women scientists. She’ll have a choice when her application
is evaluated blind.
Women will have the choice never to stoop, and will deserve the full
censure for stooping, to consider what the demands on their “beauty”
of a board of power might be, the minute they know they can count on
their fair share: that 52 percent of the seats of the highest achievement
are open to them. They will deserve the blame that they now get anyway
only when they know that the best dream of their one life will not be
forcibly compressed into an inverted pyramid, slammed up against a
glass ceiling, shunted off into a stifling pink-collar ghetto, shoved back
dead down a dead-end street.
”
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