The Enigma of The Other Woman

Something that my girl and guy friends alike have noticed, is the inevitable competition that exists between women. When women are approached by another woman or meet a new woman for the first time, her hackles instantly go up as she sizes up this female and the possible threat she brings with her. On the other hand, when women enter a new environment, they can feel strangers' eyes bearing into them and making instant judgements about their clothes, hair, weight and shoes before they are declared a threat or not.

We have seen this theme of the impending danger of the "other woman" in several pieces of literature that we have read so far this semester, including Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, two very different pieces.

In one court case that Wolf mentions, the case states that "attractiveness" is "a natural sex phenomenon which plays at least a subtle part in most personnel decisions," meaning that women are constantly sizing each other up as one woman's looks may cost another woman her job (Wolf, 38). Later, Wolf argues that it is the beauty myth itself that has "kept women from learning how to do something that makes all male social change possible: How to identify with the unknown woman in a way that is no personal" (Wolf, 75). According to Wolf, women will dismiss other women for being too pretty and made up, or looking too drab and dowdy. The perfect level is nearly impossible to achieve. "The unknown woman, the myth would like women to believe, is unapproachable; under suspicion before she opens her mouth because she's Another Woman, and beauty thinking urges women to approach each other as possible adversaries until they know they are friends," Wolf says (Wolf, 75).

Especially in a high school environment filled with hormonal teenage girls, Wolf's sentiments and concerns are on display perfectly. Freshmen often talk about receiving the "up down" look from older girls, and younger girls have described walking the hallways as daunting.

However, the same views were on display centuries early, when Wollstonecraft identified that women had to stop seeing each other as enemies and had to work together in their fight for equality. In her day, women who valued intelligence were often looked down on, as the traditional role of the woman was a domestic and subservient one. "The exclamations then which any advice respecting female learning commonly produces, especially from pretty women, often arise from envy," Wollstonecraft says, and believes that women and men both feel threatened by intelligent women (Wollstonecraft, 121). She also says that women are not able to achieve better progress because they "view each other with a suspicious and envious eye" and are unable to put that aside in order to work towards their common goal (Wollstonecraft, 122).