The Power of Heels

Magazine Article

Collected on: 3/25/09

Article can be found at : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1846719,00.html

This article talks about the impact of high heeled shoes on women. It gives both obvious and underlying reasons that women wear "pumps" and talks about the recent trend where more powerful women in the work world are wearing high heels.

This article relates to women's studies because it relates women wearing heels to sexuality, femininity, women in the working world, and power imbalence. A related topic is work, because the article talks about how heels are a woman's greatest asset in the world of work. It references women in professions like: model, cfo, actor, and politician, saying that all successful women in those professions wear high heels. It relates to power imbalence because it says women wear heels to look more powerful and combat power imbalence. It relates to sexuality because it says that heels make legs look longer, and long legs communicate a healthy youth and good breeding potential (according to evolutionary psychologist Martin Tovee). It states all the ill effects of wearing high heels like a "pump bump" and high heels causing knee injuries on stairs. It says women wear heels despite this because world of work rewards women who are both powerful and feminine and that high heels exude power combined with femininity.


Related readings include: "the second shift" (because it discusses society's unfair and suppressive expectations of women) , and "your life as a girl" (because it addresses how society tells women to behave and do "their feminine gender") among many others.

This article reflects an advance for women because it was in time magazine so it publicizes the oppression of women. Oppression in the sense that society demands that women in "men's fields" be both powerful and feminine and they can't do that with out wearing heels which are extremely harmful to women's health. The fact that women have to wear harmful heels to succeed in the work world is a big setback for women.