Ruling-class women’s leisure functions as evidence of capitalist social decay

Evidence

It would appear that women have a particularly important role here. The male industrialist continues to work even if he is a millionaire, but his wife and daughters are turning, more and more, into “luxury mammals”. Beauty competitions, competitions for new film actresses (recall the 30,000 Italian girls who sent photographs of themselves in bathing costumes to Fox in 1926), the theatre, etc., all of which select the feminine beauty of the world and put it up for auction, stimulate the mental attitudes of prostitution, and “white slaving” is practised quite legally among the upper classes. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1127

Categorization

• QUESTION: Gramsci reads beauty pageants and film casting as commodifying femininity — a claim the Islamophobia toolkit could weigh against later critiques of how Western leisure reproduces subject positions.
• XREF: connects to: Middle-class women feel society is collapsing and doubt individual remedies suffice. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 116; Ungoverned leisure historically degenerated into civic decay and instability — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 584