At what point in history did youth and beauty become more important than age and wisdom
My educated guess would be that it started in the early 20th century, and more specifically right after WWI, which gave birth to the fads and fashions of the 1920s.
Before that, youth and beauty were almost always used as a symbol for innocence. Even as late as the Victorian Era, young beautiful people, especially women, are a symbol of innocence, both about the ways of the world, and about harsher realities, such as disease and malnutrition. Their innocence is depicted as a kind of beauty in itself, and one that is all the more precious because it will undoubtedly fade very soon.
The post-WWI era is the first time that I have ever seen where there was a definite shift toward maintaining youth. For example, it’s the first time I can think of when women’s fashions really demanded young, almost sexless bodies. Full bosoms and hips, which had been in fashion just a generation ago were suddenly seen as undesirable, and undergarment manufacturers started marketing bindings for the breasts, not to shape them, but to make them disappear. Similarly, if you read mail order catalogs or magazines from the period, there is a definite shift to staying young, rather than re-capturing lost youth. Before that period, there were a lot of products marketed to both men and women which promised to restore youthful things, such as energy for women in menopause, or sexual function for aging men. Suddenly, there was an influx of products that promised eternal youth and beauty if you just used the right cream or took the right medicine. And again, in the books of that period, you see a shift from older people being honored for their age and wisdom to them being dismissed simply because they are old.
I think that the trend which started in the West in the 1920s just continued to grow as the century progressed. Unlike other fads, which come and go, that one stuck. If you even compare magazine print ads from say 1905 and 1945, you see a marked difference. In 1905 the respectable homemaker who was the target of ads for things in the home, such as housewares and appliances, was an older woman, and I would guess from looking at them that she was about 45 to 50 years old. By just after WWII, the very same types of ads showed women who were clearly much younger, with models who appeared to be in their early to mid 20s. I suspect part of it, in advertising, at least, was that the target audience in 1945 were men who were coming home from war, marrying, and settling into domestic life, and that was their age group, but I also think it’s indicative of a larger cultural trend.
Even now, it continues. Have you noticed that advertising icons such as Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker have become younger and younger? When I was a child in the 70s, the pictures of these women on packages of food showed older women with wrinkles and gray hair that clearly stated “Trust me and my products, because I have experience”. Now, if you can find the older images and compare them to the newer ones, you see drawings of women who are significantly younger, and free from bothersome wrinkles and grays.
The saddest thing in all of this, for me, at least, is that what started out as a trend in the Western world is slowly but surely being exported, and has been for some time. I was reading recently that Asian women in