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Beauty Matters: Hair Matters; Beauty, Power, & Black Women's Consciousness by Ingrid Banks; The Face of Our Past; Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present
Women's struggle for identity, unfortunately, often continues to be associated with conditions of beauty. Young girls continue to learn, through reading traditional children's literature such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, that prettiness often leads to success. These stories tout the theme of beauty as the key to happiness, making the prince, and not self-worth, the prize of every girl's quest. Although some current children's literature portrays the princess as a stronger character, such as Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess (1980), the issue of beauty is still a focus.
Beauty Matters, Hair Matters, and The Face of Our Past all address the issue of beauty and its influence on the status of women from the past to the present. Does beauty matter in deciding women's success or failure in life? If so, who decides what beauty is? Beauty Matters and Hair Matters both explore the racial and gender issues associated with beauty as well as consider how the issue of beauty can be a major setback for all women. The Face of Our Past presents a new Cinderella image that crosses racial and cultural boundaries of beauty.
Brand's Beauty Matters is divided into three sections. The first contains perspectives of how beauty has been historically defined by philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and art. The concept of beauty and how it has come to objectify women throughout time is also discussed. The second section provides a wealth of information on how the physical attributes of beauty are used in advertising commercial products. The heart of the book is in this section; the chapters outline how both women and men are dehumanized in the competitive market of advertising. The authors give examples of images that stifle self-worth and growth, discuss images of the male physique in terms of sex appeal, and argue for the rise of homophobia because of these images. The sexual fantasies of women, as well as images that represent the body as grotesque due to fears of aging, illness, disability, or death are also discussed. The final section develops the notion of beauty as art....