The importance of lipstick

Recently, I started reading the book The Secret of Life, by Howard Markel. It’s the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, retold with respect for the facts. James Watson’s bestselling book, The Double Helix, in 1968, was a great read but not very accurate. The dismissive way he treated Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who did not win the Noble Prize, is well known. But I was struck by the back-to-back quotations about lipstick at the beginning of chapter 13. Watson wrote “There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair..” Franklin’s mother wrote, “…and she always wore lipstick.” I am certain her mother was correct. I remember a man who told me when I was a medical resident (in the seventies) that I never wore a skirt, that I always wore pants on the ward, “like a dyke”. In fact, I often wore the white skirt I had been issued as part of my resident uniform (no white pants for the girls) but not when I was on call for 36 hours. After that comment, I carefully alternated skirts and pants and kept track.

We were also taught “the lipstick sign” in our clinical training. When a patient in the hospital started putting on her lipstick, it meant that she was feeling better and ready to be discharged. The first time I heard this “sign”, I remember thinking that I would never be discharged because I didn’t wear lipstick. I wasn’t opposed to it, but it seemed difficult—something I would have to reapply constantly. Those were hippie years and I always felt that I had something better to do than learn about cosmetics. But as Watson’s comment indicates, some men see lipstick as a symbol of compliant femininity, so much so, that a woman who was assertive (as Franklin was) would be perceived as not wearing it, even if she was. So you can’t win. Markel writes, “Watson’s malice toward Rosalind Franklin, and his cartoonish portrayal of her as an overemotional , angry, incompetent woman was set into the literary equivalent of concrete by the time he composed his memoir’s final line.”

Feminism in fiction

Finished reading Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Female Persuasion. She does a good job of describing some recent generations of feminism: the Gloria Steinem generation, the generation that came of age when Steinem was already the grande dame of feminism and even, at the end, a very young woman now. That character sums up her feelings:

“ We should all definitely assert ourselves more in the world, that’s totally true. But I look at everything that women did and said in recent history, and somehow we still get to a caveman moment. And our responses to it just aren’t enough, because the structures are still in place, right?”

Pretty accurate, I have to admit. Yet at least the young woman has a sense of women’s history, which my generation didn’t growing up. The contributions of women were not simply “overlooked” but often suppressed, to the greater glory of the men in their lives, or because the achievements did not fit someone’s vision of a woman’s role. Just last week, I learned that Helen Keller was a co-founder of the ACLU and supported the NAACP. She was not only a victim of a disability but an activist—not as neat a story. But people are complicated, even and maybe especially women. That’s part of Wolitzer’s message, too.