Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post:
The cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein once observed, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” The kind of beauty she had in mind is an ambivalent gift. On the one hand, it is not confined to the biologically blessed but available to everyone; on the other, it is a hard-earned prize, a product of ritualistic and often painstaking devotions at the mirror. Is this sort of beauty worth pursuing? Some feminist thinkers have bashed it as a superficial distraction. “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote disdainfully in 1792. Yet there is a tinge of misogyny to the familiar accusation that cosmetic projects are fluffy trivialities. Perhaps there is more truth (and more respect) to be found in the view of the novelist Henry James, who once described a female character’s flair for fashion as a form of “genius.”Is beautification always a capitulation to sexist pressures? Or can it be a means of self-expression? These are the perennial questions that Jill Burke takes up in “How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity.” They were also subjects of heated debate during the Renaissance, when some women chastised their peers for vanity and others maintained that beautification practices allowed them a measure of agency.
More here.