The Mold of White Womanhood

Photo by Bob Marshak. Copyright 1981. All Rights Reserved. I got the idea for this mold from a drawing in Andrea Dworkin's book Woman Hating. Andrea's drawing showed a stick figure of a woman and it listed all the ways a woman must deface herself to be considered beautiful in U.S. culture. I wanted to take this message to the street so I got some plywood and cut out a place for my body in the middle. It just fit if I had on high heels to keep the bottom from scraping the ground. To add to the symbolism of the packaging of women it was heavy and burdensome and awkward. Various women wore it to many beauty pageant protests in the early 1980s in Santa Cruz. Back to Nikki Craft's Homepage.