I once had a boyfriend whose very old, very Italian great-aunt took me aside and told me a woman's most important skill was to "not show pain" when hand-washing dishes.
To get the dishes clean, TRULY clean, the water would need to be hot enough to really hurt, and your husband was not going to like it if he had to hear you screaming and yelping for an hour every night after dinner.
I always think of that when I think of pre-feminist femininity. The ethos of sleeping in your makeup and silently boiling your own hands and eating plain iceberg lettuce and disciplining yourself to seem like you didn't even really have a body, and were perhaps just a sexy ghost.
I think most women my age grew up hearing jokes about the second wave -- oh, nooo, they were fat, they wore sandals, they had short hair and didn't shave, oh, how gross -- but, like, that was the context. That visibly having a real human body and eating and aging were radical.
Now things have relaxed enough that many of us (if not all of us) can choose how we look and how we express gender through our appearance. But I'm glad someone did that work of just refusing to perform, so that we could identify it as performance. So we'd know their hands hurt.
