I, who was never denied an education, who never spent one single day in a sweatshop, who might very well have taken the helm and become a veritable titan at Revlon — wasn’t it my own fault if I had thrown it all away, and spent my days moping instead, ambling aimlessly and thinking about women frying like chickens in heaps of stone?
Looking at the graduates on the sidewalk in New York, I wonder whether they are considering taking Woolf’s vows. And then I look down at their shoes. They are all wearing those ballet flats with metal medallions on the front.
Tory Burch, put on Forbes’ billionaires list in March 2013, has made her fortune selling these flats. Or, put more comprehensively, she has made a fortune peddling the asinine costume of New York’s Upper East Side to a worldwide audience of would-be Upper East Siders. It works because the poor want to look like the rich, or the rich like the very rich, a truism Burch had the good sense to capitalize on. Tory Burch’s elevation to the status of the ultimate success story, the woman who proves that women in our society can rise to the top, is emblematic of the limited and dubious victory 21st Century American Woman has achieved: entrance into the corporate hierarchy in a capitalist, militarized world. This was far from the dream envisioned by the hustler scholars, or by Woolf, whose dreams we forget for the same reason we forget forty acres and a mule. History serves to get us where we are and rarely deals in wayward fibers unhitched to the present scene or with hypotheticals. We learn about the amendment that freed the slaves and gave them the right to vote, but not about the failed promise of southern land reform, which might have given these newly freed men the material basis for actual freedom. Coupland’s New Yorkers continue to display their lamentable stagnancy in dress, and nary an answer can be found. We learn about Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, and their battle for women’s suffrage, but not about the sweatshop theorists who envisioned work that was healthful and sustainable for women.