Feminism teaches us about the kind of things that women do, and have traditionally had to do, to make their way in a world that leaves them few opportunities. In a world where a woman's only prospects for success involved looking pretty and attracting the support of a husband, of course women would be intensely focused on their personal appearance, even in a way that made them seem shallow and frivolous to casual observers. We should all be happy for the progress of feminism for moving us closer to a society in which women have equal opportunity to succeed in other ways. This by way of introducing Amanda's post on mothers getting plastic surgery to change themselves back to how they were before:
I would like to quarrel with the idea that women who get the “mommymakeover” are vain. In my eyes, they are economic rationalists of thehighest order. They have figured out what feminists have been notingfor a long time—that the gap between men and women economically is nowmore a gap between mothers and everyone else. Once you have a baby, your value on the market as a worker goes through the floor, relatively speaking, and your dependence on male income into the household to maintain your living standard rises, especially now that you have dependents. Even if you have a job, your ability to climb the ladder at work is getting a pinch due to discrimination against mothers.
