The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.