women throughout time- a representation

by Hudson Todd

From paintings on cave walls, to intricate poems, to pictures shown on movie posters, clearly women are not only frequently represented throughout history, but these representations have changed considerably over time. In this English course, our first view of women was simply on the cover of a handout, the movie poster for 'The Seven Year Itch' (directed by Billy Wilder), and it showed the classic image of Marilyn Monroe with her dress lifted up around her. As it was released in 1955, one could say that it is a fairly recent representation of females in society, where for a woman to be typically 'beautiful' they had to be blonde, dainty and delicate, wear dresses and elaborate clothing and be otherwise full of feminine characteristics. Yet beauty in this modern day has taken a completely different meaning. Take this picture of Selena Gomez for example;

Selena Gomez is an American singer-songwriter who, by many, is viewed as an extremely beautiful woman. But wait, Selena has brown hair, is often wearing fairly ordinary clothes eg shirts, jumpers (in this case a plain black top) and she also has a very confident stance that "her body is her own", which is nothing like the dainty, passive way that Marylin is displayed as. With such a huge change in the characteristics of 'beautiful' as this, even though it has only been 60 odd years, who knows what the 'beauty' will look like in another 60 years? Will society still have set guidelines as to how to look 'beautiful'? If so, would such guidelines be similar to the ones in place today?

Hopefully this course will help to understand in more details why such pressures are put on women and girls, and what actually motivates certain aspects of women to be seen as attractive, as well as if there is any way to lift these pressures and to truly form a society where all females just feel content with themselves as they are.

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Year 11 ATAR English

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