Femininity

Femininity refers to a set of attitudes, characteristics, and behaviors that are considered typical of or appropriate to the female sex in a given culture. These traits are generally labeled as opposite and complementary to others attributed to the male sex within broader dichotomic conceptualizations. Nonetheless, the meanings of femininity and masculinity vary greatly [Page 597]from one society to another, within any society over time, within each individual over time, and among different individuals in one group at one point in time. It is fair to say that in Western culture, femininity has been traditionally associated with qualities such as nurturing, understanding, submission, sensitivity, creativity, intuition, and passion, whereas aggressiveness, rationality, dominance, competitiveness, and objectivity have been conversely attributed to the typical or the appropriate way of being a man or a boy. This difference has been ascribed to both innate and sociocultural causes, although the importance attributed to the former has decreased over time: socialization and environmental conditioning are now considered to be the most significant triggers of different qualities, attitudes, and behaviors in women and men. More precisely, since the 1970s, social theorists have generally referred to sex when alluding to men and women's biological attributes (thus making reference to biological femaleness and maleness) and to gender when describing their culturally defined characteristics or the social organization of their lives (thus making reference to femininity and masculinity). The main conceptual tool at the core of the relation between these two dimensions is the sex-role theory, which defines gender as a set of cultural roles transmitted to individuals according to their biological sex.

It was initially supposed that sex roles were unconsciously absorbed by individuals during childhood, were reproduced in their interests and behaviors, and remained consistent throughout their life span. Femininity and masculinity were defined as two opposite poles, and any deviation from the path they delineated was considered inadequate psychosexual development. Research has investigated in more detail the way in which individuals are conditioned by gender stereotypes, revealing that individuals' actual behavior in everyday life may differ greatly from the dominant gender standards. Anthropologists have questioned the universality of attributes of femininity and masculinity, and feminist scholars have shown to what extent qualities traditionally defined as ideally feminine have been devalued in comparison with masculine ones.

Consumer-related research did not explicitly devote analyses on gender identity until the 1960s. But from the beginning of consumption studies, practices supposed to derive from typically feminine attitudes have played an important role in theorization and historical accounts. The development of capitalism during the second half of the eighteenth century and the growth in the availability and variety of commodities were understood by contemporary social theorists in a gendered perspective: the production/consumption divide was supposed to correspond to the organization of gender difference in the bourgeois family. On the one hand, production has been valued as a sober, rational, and useful activity, associated with masculinity (whose complementarity of, if not superiority over, femininity was therefore celebrated, albeit in a rather circuitous manner). On the other hand, consumption—shopping, refined taste, and display of luxury goods—came to stand for waste, extravagance, triviality, and insatiability, and was identified as a field for the accomplishment of femininity. The way Émile Zola describes women's supposed triviality and frivolity in his novel The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883) is insightful. Recounting the development of modern department stores in Paris, he depicts women shoppers entering after the seasonal displays have been completed as a crowd driven by an irresistible desire to throw themselves into luxury and be lost. The same suggestions can be found in the first social theorizations about the leisured-class mode of consumption. Thorstein Veblen (1899) describes upper-middle-class women as a subsidiary leisured class, whose task was to perform vicarious leisure and consumption activities in the name of the household and its male head. In his account of the life of the wealthier classes, conspicuous waste was the sole economic function of the woman, since her expenditure and leisure would redound to the credit of her master rather than to her own credit. The more expensive and unproductive the women were, the more they made a show of leisure, the more effectively they contributed to the reputation of the male head of the household. Upper-class woman's femininity was therefore constructed, according to Veblen, as the alienation from useful work: the lady's sphere was within the household, which she should “beautify” and of which she should be the “chief ornament.” This was reflected even in “feminine” dress, which testified the wearer's exemption from or incapacity of all productive employment.

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