The Demise of Dainty

Friends, whatever happened to dainty?

I am talking about the word dainty, used not to describe a porcelain tea set, but rather to describe women and all things female.


 



Just so we're all on the the same page, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word dainty as marked by delicate or diminutive beauty, form, or grace.  

Between the World Wars,  dainty became synonymous with "feminine hygiene" -- itself a rather dainty way of saying clean genitals.



Dainty was always an ideal; nobody's born dainty.

For decades it was a way to connote a certain kind of fragile beauty, a frilly femininity -- all ruffles, posies, and sweet smiles.  But, perhaps as a backlash, it eventually took on a negative meaning, synonymous with prissy, fussy, and fastidious, and is more likely to be used as a put-down today.

A very dainty Forties dress pattern.

Soprano singing star Jane Powell was the quintessence of Forties daintiness -- pretty (but not sexy), petite, and not too pushy -- in films like A Date With Judy.



Elizabeth Taylor started out as dainty, playing a fragile, sweet-tempered ingenue in Cynthia at age sixteen.  Just a few years later, however, in A Place in the Sun, a more voluptuous, confident Elizabeth represented something much more dangerous and decidedly less dainty.

 


Let's fact facts: nobody in the West expects women to be dainty anymore and perhaps that's a good thing.  There was something repressive about the very concept of dainty that denied women their own strength and sexuality.

But there was something optimistic about dainty, too, something youthful and appealingly innocent.

In 1945, Jeanne Crain, playing an Iowa farm girl (top pic) in the film State Fair. could sing, longingly:
 
I keep wishing I were somewhere else,
Walking down a strange new street.
Hearing words that I have never heard,
From a man I've yet to meet.

Eighteen years later we had the hip-swiveling bombshell Ann-Marget, playing a suburban teenager in Bye Bye Birdie crooning:

There are men of nineteen or twenty
Who are suave and reckless and true
Older men who give a girl plenty
I've gotta a lot of livin' to do

And we knew exactly what kind of livin' she was talking about.  Dainty was seriously endangered.

Today, Britney Spears, croaks the double-entendre'd:

If I said my heart was beating loud
If we could escape the crowd somehow
If I said I want your body now
Would you hold it against me.

Britney is to dainty what Agent Orange is to the California redwoods.

What a journey we've traveled in a just a few generations!
 

Even Walt Disney studios, which did more to extend the life of dainty than any other filmmaker, with its shiny re-tellings of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, all scrubbed of their gruesome bits, replaced the warbly, uber-dainty soprano sound of it's heroines (think Snow White) with a more confident Broadway-style belt (think The Little Mermaid).  Dainty went the way of the dodo.

Readers, just what killed off dainty?  I can identify a number of factors, none by themselves the proverbial nail in the coffin, but all contributing to dainty's (unavoidable) demise:  

a) World Wars I & II, which forced women into traditionally male roles;

b) The pill, which disconnected sex from the fear of pregnancy; 

c) Marilyn Monroe, whose joyful sexual expressiveness was a direct attack on the delicate, dainty ideal; 



d) Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, which revealed that a dainty facade may be just that, a facade; 

e) Films like Rebel Without a Cause, that presented young people of both sexes as alienated from the adult world, and depicted them as multidimensional beings as opposed to sunny songbirds.

In closing, readers, is dainty something you ever aspired to be, or were taught you should be?

Is dainty truly dead, or does it live on in the cultural crevices: Disney princesses, Barbie pink, and Casey's Elegant Musings?

In your opinion, when we dumped dainty, did we throw out the baby with the bathwater, or was it good-bye and good riddance?    Do you ever feel nostalgic for dainty?

Speak up, Ladies (and Gents), but please, don't shout.