Where women in mid-century America had been occupied with “inexhaustible but ephemeral” domestic work, beating back disorder with fastidious housekeeping and consumer purchases, they were now occupied by inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts of time, anxiety, and money to adhere to a standard over which they had no control. Beauty constituted a sort of “third shift,” Wolf wrote—an extra obligation in every possible setting.

Why would smart and ambitious women fall for this? (Why do I have such a personal relationship with my face wash? Why have I sunk thousands of dollars over the past half decade into ensuring that I can abuse my body on the weekends without changing the way it looks?) Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things in order to accept the beauty myth. First, she had to think about beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and sacrifice,” even more.