![]() ![]() Focusing on female beauty standards and contradictions, sex and female sexuality, and women’s roles as workers, wives and mothers, Janega reflects on what this study of women in the middle ages means now: ![]() Janega explores medieval gender norms to consider the ways that women’s roles have – and haven’t – changed. In her lively exploration of medieval women’s social roles, Janega shows how beauty “was a key to power”, crucially connected to wealth, privilege, youth and maidenhood – to create “a ‘perfect’ sort of femininity”. ![]() Such cultural associations are addressed by Eleanor Janega in her book The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society. But in medieval culture, such pressures were doubly weighted, since beauty was closely aligned with morality: beauty was associated with goodness and ugliness with evil. In her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argued that the standards of western female beauty were used as a weapon to stagnate the progress of women. ![]() It’s no wonder that instances of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and dysmorphia can all be connected to modern – and indeed, pre-modern – people’s experience of beauty standards. The association of beauty with health, and ugliness with disease, has been taken up in more recent feminist debate over the modern cultural obsession with women’s appearance as an epidemic. ![]()
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