This is Melanie. She is at university and like most students she is interested in the broader social aspects of university life. She has joined a number of clubs and organisations within the university community. As a young woman she is interested in contemporary feminism and is considering joining the Feminist Society. Do you think she will be accepted? You would hope so wouldn't you and perhaps she will be but perhaps not.

Twenty years ago she almost certainly would not have been, not dressed like that anyway. She would have been branded a mindless slave to fashion, dressing as a plaything of men and, as such, unacceptible as a member of any serious feminist organisation.

Have things changed? "Not that much" says Linda Scott, a professor of advertising and of gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her new book "Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism" she takes on the myth that to be a serious feminist you must aschew all attempts at beauty. Pointing to the fact that their values were rooted in an upper-class Puritan tradition and that those values strongly influenced their attitude to dress and personal appearance. She says

In their calls for simplicity of dress, (they) were echoing years of conservative tradition in their own community, rather than making a ground-breaking critique as is often claimed.

It seems that, from a traditional feminist perspective, women should be free to be anything they want to be except, of course, attractive.

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