Stereotypes In Amy Cunningham's Why Women Smile

“American woman’s smile often has less to do with her actual state of happiness than it does with the social pressure” (Cunningham 327).

When you stop to reflect upon the last time you smiled, was it out of genuine happiness or was it because you felt socially pressured to smile? Most likely it was a reaction out of discomfort and not an actual expression of joy. Society has pressured us to smile in order to show submission and not aggression.

Has society ceased to see how they have influenced women and how they feel the need to constantly smile? According to Amy Cunningham in Why Women Smile there has been a major influence on women and why we smile so much. For a multitude of previous generations, women have always smiled their way

through disconcerting situations even though they may want to cry, or express other emotions. The author discusses the primitive behavior of primates and how they always smiled to display submission and to show they were not harmful. This is a major connection being made by the author, she is connecting and comparing two almost identical species, signifying that presumably women smile so people don’t feel threatened. Smiling has evolved alongside humanity, similar to what we as species do. The stereotypical perception of smiling is as an exhibition of felicity. Cunningham also assembles a connection to the American slaves. Slaves typically smiled to show people that they wouldn’t harm them. After the emancipation of slaves many African-Americans did not smile to show submission anymore. During this time, people were afraid of African Americans due to the fact that they were behaving in a more independent fashion.
To date the evolution of the smile, smiling back thus far shows that it has evolved immensely and through those years the stereotyping of smiling has not changed significantly.

Also, Cunningham states that babies smile when they have someone next to them that is enjoying all the emotion coming from the baby. When talking about this she is referring to people and their genetic set up. When looking at a smiling baby who thinks of unhappiness, nobody. This is why the author decided to add this in because, it gets an emotional response. People think of smiling as a positive emotion rather than a negative emotion. But, what if people were smiling just because they had too, several people feel the need to constantly be smiling meanwhile they are having a flood of other emotions running through their body. However, when reading this essay, you understand that throughout history, and society the role of smiling has changed. When women used to smile or laugh immoderately, society frowned upon it. Although this role has changed drastically over the last 100 years. Women are looked at disapprovingly and differently if they don’t smile rather than when they do. Author gives us an example of this when she talks about her

friend.
She says “A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after class and being asked if she was ok?” Her friend could only come up with the reason as to why the teacher would ask this, and that was due to her not smiling. Although everything was fine, she assumed that something was wrong since the friend wasn’t smiling. This shows that society expects women to smile otherwise people assume that they are dealing with a difficult situation or that they have recently experienced a traumatic incident.
While reading this passage I came to the conclusion that I enjoyed and agreed with the writing of Cunningham. When relating this essay to my life there is many aspects that I understand really well. I have never been a super joyful person, but there is a lot of social pressure from everyone to always be smiling. Even in the stressful times of trying to get things ready for college, meanwhile staying caught up with your academics, people still smile daily.