Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print.

To help me with my writing I have gathered a hand full of quotes from Wolf's 'The Beauty Myth'. I still need to go through and analyse some of them - which I will no doubt do as I write the essay. Most of Wolf's writing was mostly relevant to what I am planning to write about second wave feminism.

1. "After a long silence, women took to the streets"
2. "In the two decades of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s, Western women gained legal and reproductive rights."
3. "Many are ashamed to admit such trivial concerns - to do with physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair, clothes - matter so much."
4. "During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest growing medical speciality"
5. thirty-three thousand American women told researchers they would rather loose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal"
6. "it is a dark vein of self hatred, physical obsessions, terror of ageing, and dread of lost control."
7. "in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement; the beauty myth"
8. "the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable"
9. "feminists, inspired by Friedan, broke the stranglehold on the women's popular press advertisers for household products" and "at once, the diet and skincare industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space"
10. "the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter or successful womanhood"
11. "the sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality"
12. "Reproductive rights gave Western women control over our own bodies; the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23% below of that of ordinary women, eating disorders rose exponentially"
13. "Every generation since about 1830 has had to fight its version of the beauty myth"
14. "Eighty years later, after women had won the vote, and the first wave of the organised women's movement had subsided, Virginia Woolfe wrote that it would still be decades before women could tell the truth about their bodies"
15. "Women's beauty must correlate to their fertility, and since this system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless"
16. " 'Beauty' is not universal or changeless"
17. "There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today's power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women"
18. "It is about men's institutions and institutional power"
19. "Since the industrial revolution, middle-class Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints"
20. New technologies could reproduce "in fashion plates, daguerrotypes, tintypes and rotogravures - images of how women should look." 
21. "All such Victorian inventions as these…" (needlework, lacemaking etc) "…served a double function - that is, though they were encouraged as a means to expend female energy and intelligence in harmless ways"
22. "It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male dominated institutions throated by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation - latent fears that we might be going too far"
23. "As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty"
24. "The caricature of the Ugly Feminist was resurrected to dog the steps of the women's movement"
25. "The unpleasant image of feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered the the interests who so bitterly oppose the vote for women in state after state"

As I understand it, Wolf is trying to explain that 'the Beauty Myth' as she describes it, came as a backlash to women gaining power. It is an insecurity that women will not meet the ideals of what it is to be 'beautiful' and the attention towards it has been heightened through freedom gained elsewhere. With the book being over 20 years old, some points Wolf makes are not as relevant to society today. However, I believe that women (and men in most cases) are still striving towards ideals that are defined by society - which relates to gender identity and is a more recent topic of discussion. I think this is an issue that third-wave feminists are beginning to address in order to change the way society sees various body types and "imperfections" but like all change, it takes time and willingness to discuss it.