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The Force of Beauty - Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic (Hardcover)
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The Force of Beauty - Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic (Hardcover)
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The market for commercial beauty products exploded in Third
Republic France, with a proliferation of goods promising to erase
female imperfections and perpetuate an aesthetic of femininity that
conveyed health and respectability. While the industry's meteoric
growth helped to codify conventional standards of womanhood, The
Force of Beauty goes beyond the narrative of beauty culture as a
tool for sociopolitical subjugation to show how it also targeted
women as important consumers in major markets and created new
avenues by which they could express their identities and challenge
or reinforce gender norms. As cosmetics companies and cultural
media, from magazines to novels to cinema, urged women to aspire to
commercial standards of female perfection, beauty evolved as a goal
to be pursued rather than a biological inheritance. The products
and techniques that enabled women to embody society's feminine
ideal also taught them how to fashion their bodies into objects of
desire and thus offered a subversive tool of self-expression. Holly
Grout explores attempts by commercial beauty culture to reconcile a
standard of respectability with female sexuality, as well as its
efforts to position French women within the global phenomenon of
changing views on modern womanhood. Grout draws on a wide range of
primary sources-hygiene manuals, professional and legal debates
about the right to fabricate and distribute ""medicines,""
advertisements for beauty products, and contemporary fiction and
works of art-to explore how French women navigated changing views
on femininity. Her seamless integration of gender studies with
business history, aesthetics, and the history of medicine results
in a textured and complex study of the relationship between the
politics of womanhood and the politics of beauty.
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