A Georgia girl named Maya Van Wagenen, who at the age of 13 found herself socially anxious at a new school, picked up Betty Cornell’s Glamour Guide for Teens, an etiquette book published in 1951, and used it as her blueprint for popularity. It worked, and she documented the process with a diary, which she recently sold to Penguin for $300,000. But it doesn’t end there. Dreamworks, always on the lookout for material that will have broad appeal, made a deal with her to make a film out of the book. At 15 years old, she is the youngest non-actor to make a feature film deal with Dreamworks.
I find this pretty amusing, because it proves that traditional femininity, all the rage in the 1950s due to the adoption of a conservative, Freudian philosophy as the guiding standard for family life at the time, gets a girl farther than adopting a defiant, hostile and unattractive feminist stance.
The 1950s were far from perfect. There were clearly a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out, such as the problem of economically unproductive housewives, and Freud’s ideas were based in large part on faulty assumptions, but it was closer to the ideal than the contemporary setup.
Media outlets are gushing over Ms. Van Wagenen, but the material in the etiquette book would give feminists fits. For example, girls are urged to wear a girdle and white gloves and learn to do tricks with strands of pearls (I have no idea what that means, but I assume it’s innocent). There must be a little more to it than fashion (maybe not much), as the book also recommends being “open, honest and kind.”
I looked the book up on Amazon, and found a couple reviews. According to one hefty feminist, it is “fascinatingly awful.” Another writes “If you are a teenage girl, this book tells you that you better be skinny with perfect hair and make-up.”
Then, I found a review on a website called “Embarrassing Treasures” that includes a few more quotes and some background on author Betty Cornell. It turns out that Cornell had been a big girl when young, and her advice revolves in large part around keeping a trim figure. To do that, she advocates what loks like a low-carb diet:
Sample Menus for Weight Control
Breakfast: Half a grapefruit, 1 poached egg on rye or whole wheat toast with small amount of butter, 1 glass of milk.
Lunch: Small container of cottage cheese, fresh fruit, any kind of lean meat sandwich, consommé, milk
Dinner: 1 glass of tomato juice, generous serving of broiled calf’s liver, serving of cooked carrots, tomato and lettuce salad with lemon juice, fruit Jello, milk.
Cornell on identifying fattening foods:
If you don’t know what foods are fattening, ask your chubby friends, because they will know.
Here’s why she recommends a girdle:
Even a teen with a trim figure needs to coax her curves a bit when it comes to wearing slim skirts and slacks. To me there is nothing more repellent than a protruding fanny or a bulging tummy marring the outline of a narrow silhouette.
So much for the “changing beauty standards” fantasy feminists go on about.
Although it’s tempting for me to write this stuff off as trivial, I can’t think of anything that so clearly demonstrates the utter failure of feminism better than the enormous success and accolades that have fallen into young Maya Van Wagenen’s lap.
Eat your heart out, feminists.
