Given the concerns of the course, I thought people might enjoy (re)visiting the Yeats poem "Adam's Curse" (1903):
http://www.slate.com/id/3409/
In the poem's precise terms, it's not that you "have to suffer to be beautiful"; rather, it's that you "have to *labor* to be beautiful." Sarah Berry contends that, in the shift to post-Depression, consumer capitalism, "people have come to be identified with what they consume rather than what they produce" -- a shift away from a capitalism "based on Max Weber's famous Protestant work ethic" (xiii). Maybe so: but it still seems interesting to conceptualize a woman's labors to feminize herself as a form of "labor." Brownmiller dwells much on the labor-intensive nature of femininity's upkeep. A further, large, question, of course, is: To what degree and in what sense is such labor "alienated," and can any of it be recovered as "unalienated"?
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