Grandma Interview & Mad Men

While I was watching the TV show Mad Men, I wrote down something Betty said about her mother: "She wanted me to be beautiful so that I could find a man. There's nothing wrong with that." She was referring to her mother's concern with her weight when she was a child. I couldn't help but relate this to my own grandmother and her daughter. While interviewing my grandma, I asked her about my aunt's nose-job. I knew that my grandma had paid for it, and I wanted to hear what my aunt had said to convince her to allow this. As it turns out, the story behind the nose-job, which I have only heard spoken of twice in the family, was different than I imagined. "I encouraged it," my grandma said right away. She explained, "Her nose was like Uncle Barry's was... it was, um, big and crooked, so I encouraged her to do it."I was surprised by this. The same woman who, earlier in the conversation, told me how she would meet with girls in "woman's rights groups" and write letters to "political officials" about woman's issues that were important to her: "about abortion and birth control and jobs". "Woman didn't have very much rights" when she was a kid. She went on to say, "women got paid less than men and didn't have as high positions." I did not understand how she could care about women's rights issues as a teenager, but encourage her daughter's nose-job as a mother. Speaking about motherhood, she told me she "consciously made an effort to treat her [daughter] more equally [to boys]," because she wanted her daughter to have the opportunities woman of her time did not.

Gender equality clearly matters to my grandmother, so how is it that she promoted that my aunt fix her nose? I wonder if she had the same thought Betty and Betty's mother did, that her daughter should be made "beautiful so that... [she] could find a man." Who was the nose-job for? For herself, for other girls, or to impress boys? This links directly with a conversation I had with my mother yesterday during breakfast. She was asking me when I would "grow up" and start wearing makeup. (I can currently count on my hand the number of times I have worn makeup and I am happy to keep it that way; I told her prom and my wedding are the only two times she will likely see me in makeup again.) I identified those three as being the only reasons a heterosexual woman would wear makeup: herself, to impress women in competition, to "find a man." I see makeup and a nose-job both very similarly. Some woman view both as optimizing a woman's beauty. I see them as falsifying a woman's beauty, creating a fake version of herself to fit into society's version of "beauty." The plastic surgery and makeup perpetuate a one sided idea of what is beautiful, so that a woman must be society's idea of "beautiful so that... [she can] find a man."