Dress lets the idle woman believe she is recreating her own self.
Evidence
Dressing has a twofold significance: it is meant to show the woman’s social standing (her standard of living, her wealth, the social class she belongs to), but at the same time it concretizes feminine narcissism; it is her uniform and her attire; the woman who suffers from not doing anything thinks she is expressing her being through her dress. Beauty treatments and dressing are kinds of work that allow her to appropriate her person as she appropriates her home through housework; she thus believes that she is choosing and re-creating her own self. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1551
Categorization
- XREF: Direct echo of the chapter on housework as appropriation; beauty work extends the same labor structure into the body. — connects to: Feminine dress functions as self-decoration, offering the wearer up as merchandise — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1078; Women believe dress grants access to both the world and an idealized self; Busywork like needlework masks the idleness of the unoccupied woman without real purpose — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1732
- ADDENDUM: Directly bears on ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — Beauvoir offers the structural-existential mechanism behind why dress codes police women, not just their moral rhetoric.