‘Heavenly creatures’ in Vogue: Childlike femininity and longing for innocence lost

Feminists have long critiqued childlike constructions of femininity – from Wollstonecraft to de Beauvoir to Faludi. Aligning women with children, they argued, served to cement inequalities between the sexes; women were, in effect, honorary children, and as such were not fully adult, making it easy to justify their differential treatment. Yet in spite of these dehumanising connotations, and the partial gains of feminism, the woman-child continues to appear as a prominent and prevalent subject-position in the British fashion media. In this chapter, I point to the role that nostalgic longing plays in the (possible) appeal of the woman-child, and the way it allows such photographs to circulate with little contestation, thereby sanctioning the woman-child as a legitimate ‘subject position’ for contemporary women (Foucault, 1989). I focus on one particular discursive construct of childlike femininity - the Romantic woman-child – and question what she might signify today and the ideological implications for the project of feminism.