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function of the beauty myth is evident in the timing of these case laws. It was not until women crowded the public realm that laws proliferated about appearance in the workplace.
    What must this creature, the serious professional woman, look like?
    Television journalism vividly proposed its answer. The avuncular male anchor was joined by a much younger female newscaster with a professional prettiness level.
    That double image—the older man, lined and distinguished, seated beside a nubile, heavily made-up female junior—became the paradigm for the relationship between men and women in the workplace. Its allegorical force was and is pervasive: The qualification of professional prettiness, intended at first to sweeten the unpleasant fact of a woman assuming public authority, took on a life of its own, until professional beauties were hired to be made over into TV journalists. By the 1980s, the agents who headhunted anchors kept their test tapes under categories such as “Male Anchors: 40 to 50,” with no corresponding category for women, and ranked women anchors’ physical appearance above their delivery skills or their experience.
    The message of the news team, not hard to read, is that a powerful man is an individual, whether that individuality is expressed in asymmetrical features, lines, gray hair, hairpieces, baldness, bulbousness, tubbiness, facial tics, or a wattled neck; and that his maturity is part of his power. If a single standard were applied equally to men as to women in TV journalism, most of the men would be unemployed. But the women beside them need youth and beauty to enter the same soundstage. Youth and beauty, covered in solid makeup, present the anchorwoman as generic—an “anchorclone,” in the industry’s slang. What is generic is replaceable. With youth and beauty, then, the working woman is visible, but insecure, made to feel her qualities are not unique. But, without them, she is invisible—she falls, literally, “out of the picture.”
    The situation of women in television simultaneously symbolizes and reinforces the professional beauty qualification ingeneral: Seniority does not mean prestige but erasure—of TV anchors over forty, 97 percent, claims anchorwoman Christine Craft, are male and “the other 3% are fortyish women who don’t look their age.” Older anchorwomen go through “a real nightmare,” she wrote, because soon they won’t be “pretty enough to do the news anymore.” Or if an anchorwoman is “beautiful,” she is “constantly harassed as the kind of person who had gotten her job solely because of her looks.”
    The message was finalized: The most emblematic working women in the West could be visible if they were “beautiful,” even if they were bad at their work; they could be good at their work and “beautiful” and therefore visible, but get no credit for merit; or they could be good and “unbeautiful” and therefore invisible, so their merit did them no good. In the last resort, they could be as good and as beautiful as you please—for too long; upon which, aging, they disappeared. This situation now extends throughout the workforce.
    That double standard of appearance for men and women communicated itself every morning and every night to the nations of working women, whenever they tried to plug in to the events of “their” world. Their window on historical developments was framed by their own dilemma. To find out what is going on in the world always involves the reminder to women that
this
is going on in the world.
    In 1983, working women received a decisive ruling on how firmly the PBQ was established, and how far it could legally go. The thirty-six-year-old Craft filed suit against her ex-employers, Metromedia Inc., at Kansas City on the charge of sex discrimination. She had been dismissed on the grounds that, as Christine Craft quotes her employer, she was “too old, too unattractive, and not deferential to men.”
    Her dismissal followed months