The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women

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Description

In the struggle for women's equality, there is one subject still shrouded in uneasy silence - women's compulsive pursuit of beauty. The myth of female beauty challenges every woman, every day of her life. The author exposes the tyranny of the beauty myth through the ages and its oppressive function today, in the home and at work, in literature and the media, in relationships between men and women, between women and women. With examples, she confronts the beauty industry and its advertising and uncovers the reasons why women are consumed by this destructive obsession.

Reviews

A smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it. -- Gloria Steinem
Powerful... No other work has...so honestly depicted the confusion of accomplished women who feel emotionally and physically tortured by the need to look like movie stars * New York Times *
The most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch -- Germaine Greer
A brilliant, bracing book...The world has changed - a bit - over the past decade and a half, but not enough: this remains essential reading * Guardian *
Essential reading -- Fay Weldon

Author Bio

Naomi Wolf was born in 1962 in San Francisco. She studied at Yale before becoming a Rhodes scholar at New College, Oxford, and working in Edinburgh. The Beauty Myth was published in 1990 and was an international bestseller. This was followed by Fire with Fire, Promiscuities, Misconceptions and The Tree House.