This week on From the Vault we expand our discussion on society’s obsession with beauty and how that affects the health and well-being of women – and to a lesser degree men – with two outstanding recordings that search for the roots of this obsession. Our first recording, produced and hosted by Susan Anderson in 1978, is titled If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sitting on It Before I’ll Give It Away, and explores the two major images of women portrayed on American television since World War II: the consumer-ready “happy homemaker†and the “ideal beauty.†Our second featured piece is a 1991 conversation between KPFK’s Feminist Magazine host Jude McGee and author and Rhodes Scholar Naomi Wolfe. At the time of the interview, Wolfe’s recently-published, groundbreaking book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, had already garnered accolades from iconic Second-Wave Feminist icons such as Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan.
From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio listeners.
First broadcast on Friday, May 11, 2012
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