I love picking up the Financial Times on week-ends. It adds a brainiac touch that would never happen with a copy of Vogue, and it gives a little dose of the too common yet awfully efficient sexy-librarian stereotype when you add a pair of glasses to the picture.

In this week-end’s edition was a fascinating article by Katie Roiphe, a professor at New York University, about the American Ideal

A vast subject inspired by an upcoming exhibit at the New York Metropolitan Museum: American Woman: Fashioning National Identity. The show which will open after Vogue holds their annual Gala, will attempt to define the American Girl through her various archetypes such as the heiress, the Gibson girl, the suffragette, the patriot, the bohemian, the flapper and the screen siren.

Myth or Reality, I highly recommend the reading as it sheds light on the American Girl seems and her seemingly Supernatural Powers.

Here are some excerpts from the FT article that I hope will make you want to read more:

There is no American woman, only millions of assorted American women: the huddled masses, the poor, the sick, the hungry and the very, very rich, the bluebloods, the Chinese immigrants, and the daughters of Pakistani taxi drivers, trying to go about their lives as best they can. And then, even if there were an American woman texting her boyfriend, or packing a snack for her three-year-old, she probably wouldn’t, in her essence, be all that different from a woman in Berlin, Belgium or Bombay.

…the quintessential American girl embodying all of the archetypes: flirtatious and over-naïve, vulgar and sincere, rebellious and sweet…. There is an ambivalence, a double edge of admiration and contempt; she is intriguing, but also, fast, materialistic, unsophisticated. She lacks taste, subtlety.

Does the current issue of Vogue, which pigeonholes contemporary women into these types, like squeezing flesh into corsets, have any intellectual value? One can dismiss the quaint historical feel of the archetypes, the purely artificial imposition of types on to the unruly lives of real women.(…) . Michelle Obama, for instance, with her bare arms and strong biceps is our answer to the Gibson girl on her bicycle.

Despite their travails, the girls and women I write will always triumph in the end. They will defeat the bad guys, overcome their daddy issues, outgrow their crushes, and take over the world. (…) What else would we expect from the American Woman? After all, the national rhetoric is built on notions of dreaming and overcoming, of fearlessness, progress, and hope. -Stephanie Savage

You Go Girl!!!

Catherine Malandrino