Women, Society And Self-Esteem -- By: Linda Van Grinsven

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 08:3 (Summer 1994)
Article: Women, Society And Self-Esteem
Author: Linda Van Grinsven


Women, Society And Self-Esteem

Linda Van Grinsven

Linda Van Grinsven is an electrical engineer with IBM. Her article is based on a speech she gave at a Covenant Women’s meeting at Rochester Covenant Church.

Self-esteem is often very simply defined as “feeling good about yourself.” In reality, self-esteem is much more complicated than that. To understand self-esteem we must first start with another term, self-concept.

My self-concept contains a wide variety of images and beliefs. Some of these images and beliefs refer to facts, such as “I am a woman,” “I am Caucasian” or “I am a mother.” Others refer to my less tangible aspects and their accuracy is not so easily verified. These include items such as “I am smart,” “I am organized” or “I am overweight.” I must next decide which of these items are most important to me. If the most important items are positive ones like, “I am smart” and “I am organized,” then I will have a high level of self-esteem. If the items that are most important to me are negative ones such as “I am overweight,” then I will have a low level of self-esteem.1

Do you feel good about yourself? Unfortunately, a majority of American women today do not. A recent survey found that American women have more negative feelings about themselves physically than women in any other culture studied.2 How can this be, when American women as a group have more education, money, power, legal and political recognition than women in any other country? Yet, in terms of how we American women feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our grandmothers!3 As one author put it, “I have yet to meet a woman who couldn’t tell me, in detail, what was wrong with her body.” We all know what we don’t like about ourselves physically.

Why does physical appearance so profoundly affect the self-esteem of American women today? What elements of our society cause this to be so? We can begin by looking at the images that surround us every day. Whether we read a magazine, watch TV or go to a movie, the images of beautiful women surround us. We may laugh at the idealized image of the gorgeous fashion models and even find this image irritating, but it does surround us and affect us.

When we examine the feminine ideal that the media bombards us with, we can come to some conclusions about what is expected of women today: In order to achieve a high level of self-esteem, always look beautiful, always be thin and never, ever grow old.

Beauty

Contemporary American ...

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