Reply to Women's middle aged appearance, through the decades

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think the biggest shift has been in attitude about what married women and women with kids were "allowed" to look like. There was a time when being a mom or a married woman and wearing your hair down and loose, wearing more casual clothes or showing your body shape in any way, even wearing attractive makeup or jewelry, would have been considered wrong.

[b]This attitude didn't disappear all at once and in certain very religious or conservative communities, it actually still exists, and women in those communities still look prematurely aged.[/b]

But for most of us the shift happened sometime between the 60s and the 80s, and was somewhat gradual, until by the 90s, the idea that a woman had to start looking older and dowdier upon marriage and kids was basically gone.

I think we swung too far in the other direction for a time with the idea that middle aged moms need to look "hot" and still be attractive to the average man, which is just misogyny at work. But now we're sort of in the middle, where middle aged women can be comfortable and practice body acceptance and do what they want with regards to hair and makeup (including skipping it all together and letting themselves go gray) but we don't also require them to cover themselves up, hide their shape under heavy-duty bras and girdles, or wear "ladylike" clothes that conform to very narrow ideas of what women can do and be.

I feel truly liberated with how I look as a mom in my 40s. I don't always like how I look, but I don't feel a ton of pressure to conform to any specific look or to please any specific social group with my clothes or beauty choices. It's progress.[/quote]
I agree that styling is a lot of it, but those women live hella depressing lives. That gets written all over people’s faces. Even for the women who are doing all the “right” things to look younger or their own age, if you’re deeply unhappy, you look dragged down and haggard and that ages a person. [/quote]

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