Social Pressure In Anna Cunningham's 'Why Women Smile'

Growing up, my daughter Brittany had a quote on her bedroom wall “Smiling is my favorite” from the movie Elf. As I was reading Anna Cunningham’s “Why Women Smile’, I found myself remembering that quote on her wall throughout the essay. Her essay is a sociological piece on gender division and the social pressures that accompany a smile. The pressure comes from public expectation that a woman not smiling is an unhappy person. A woman is expected to smile in all sorts of situations appropriate to smiling or not, this is Cunningham’s smile burden. A smile isn’t a burden, it’s sometimes an instinctual reaction and often should be a decision consciously made based on the situation at hand.

Brittany has an infectious smile, a huge dimple on her right

Everyone is familiar with her examples of women smiling in ads to sell wares. I see her point, but I wonder why she makes it. I am female, if I’m purchasing something it’s typically something that will make my life better happier, if the person in the ad doesn’t look happy why would I want to buy the product. This is a conscious decision by a marketing company to show us happiness with a manipulated smile. Cunningham believes that change is already in the air and that women are going to be taken more seriously if we show more women with a media presence not smiling. She emphasizes her point with Nike ads of nonsmiling “athletes sweating, reaching, pushing themselves” (Cunningham 176). Again, as a consumer, I do not expect to see a smiling running

As a female and mother I again find myself thinking about that quote on my daughter wall. Did she feel that we were pressuring her to hide her true feelings and smile to hide other emotions? Last night I texted her this “Women have used smiling to comfort, express themselves, mask discomfort and even manipulate. Is this gender division or adaptation? “I’m hoping she tells me that the topic is interesting but she likes smiling. As a follow up to her essay, Cunningham tells us that she now knows that a majority of her article was wrong. That she was so deep in her convictions of societal pressures that she missed the point of the data her source, Paul Ekman was providing. Ekman’s studies showed that smiles even if they are fake can lift moods and make a person genuinely happier (Cunningham 177). A spontaneous smile or a smile slapped on a face out of necessity may be just what someone needs to make themselves and those around them a little