During the romantic period, women were judged on their beauty, something that they have no control over. This idea of beauty was pushed on young girls and this made them feel as if beauty was the only thing that’s important, but the romantic period literature was going to change that. Beauty is shown as the single most important thing for a women in Northanger Abbey and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is wrong because it’s degrading for women to be judged on something that they can’t control, this then affects how women are depicted in literature, changing the work’s tone to be satirical, making fun of this idea, or rebellious, in going away from these beauty standards.
Instead of degrading women based on their beauty, women should
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Even at such young ages, girls were held at these same extreme beauty standards as their mothers were, believing that they had to be this ideal beautiful ‘cookie-cutter’ woman, or else they won’t be beautiful at all. Women, including young girls, felt as though they could only be beautiful if society said so and as soon as society said so, then all of a sudden they must be beautiful. These standards aren’t fair to women because women shouldn’t have to be judged by society for their looks, and society shouldn't be able to tell them when they are beautiful and when they aren’t. Society put these standards into women’s heads, and Austen realized that they need to be taken out. She tried to do this by writing in a satirical tone in hopes that readers would see that these beauty standards are wrong and need to be changed. Another example of how degrading the beauty standards were can be seen in this quote, “‘she is almost pretty to-day’ were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds! (Austen 3). By hearing this type of talk every day it can be seen as very degrading and can make women feel very self-consciousness about the way they