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Raquel Welch, striding the Broadway stage and looking sensational at 41, observes other women walking down Manhattan or Malibu streets. Says she: "I get the feeling that women enjoy being women more. The whole message is to be happy in your own skin." Notes New York Times Op-Ed Page Editor Charlotte Curtis: "What is really strong about the new woman is her fearlessness. She's standing up in a way she never used to."
She is teaching her own daughters to stand even straighter and stronger. "Conceptions of beauty start in the family," says Harvard Psychologist Jackie Zilbach, "and they start very young. Little girls tend to follow their mothers' notions of beauty." The previous generation of mothers had not put much store in exercise, for themselves or their children. But members of the Jane Fonda generation have remade their own bodies, and are encouraging their lithe young daughters to start from scratch. In Chicago, new mothers are flexing the arms and legs of their month-old babies in an infant aerobics course. By the time they grow up, after a youth of exercise and competition encouraged at home and at school, these girls will have acquired naturally the bodies their mothers fought to shape.
It can be argued that the strong woman is only this summer's fashion, like Deely Bobbers and E.T., and that most women will soon tire of sweating themselves into fight ing shape. The disco beat at the local health club may begin to sound as monotonous as the old metronome; muscular aerobicians will resent being mistaken for football players; Jane Fonda will find herself another cause and let her deltoids go to flab. Throughout history, women have been alternately starved and stuffed, and no one can guarantee that next year's body heroine won't be Dolly Parton. But to imagine this is to ignore the strides the contemporary woman has taken in the past dozen years and the good sense she has shown in achieving her new status.
Medicine has made her more aware of how her body works. The fitness phenomenon has proved she has the capacity to make it work. Her new sense of self-assurance has convinced her that strength — of the body, mind and will — is beautiful.
That charming chauvinist Charles Baudelaire said that woman should employ artifice to "rise above nature."
New York Poet Carol Muske, 35, takes a different view, and eloquently defends the strong, smart female. "Woman is nature," Muske says, "Her body is like lightning:
it looks pleasing — and it can run a toaster. And her new beauty comes from the fact that there is no more shame, no hiding of the 'mysteries' of the female body. Now she can bare it, muscle it, do anything with, to, and for it she chooses. The new beauty is possibility — what women can become."
— By Richard Corliss.
Reported by Martha Smilgis/ Los Angeles and Denise Worrell/ New York