Smiles And Women “Why Women Smile” by Amy Cunningham is a compelling piece that showcases why women smiling all the time is not as harmless as it may seem. She makes the reader, especially the women, ask themselves, “Is smiling all the time really a positive thing?” Cunningham gives multiple sound reasons as to why it is not, such as social pressures women receive to always smile. I agree that women have a complicated relationship with smiling, from being not fully in control of our smiles, to just being expected to smile, and owning our smiles. Amy Cunningham’s essay, “Why Women Smile”, is about the history and experiences of women’s need to smile. She starts off with an anecdote about her own experience and then dives right into her point.
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Unless the emotion is happiness, society wants women to hide their feelings. “Evidently, a woman’s happy, willing deference is something the world wants visibly demonstrated.” (Cunningham 191) She brings up how men will often come up to random women on the street who are not smiling and tell those women to smile, as if a random stranger’s facial expression is really that important to them. Cunningham recalls when a friend told her about an experience she had, “A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after class and asked, ‘What is wrong, dear? You sat there for the whole hour looking so sad!’ ‘All I could figure,’ my friend says now, ‘is that I wasn’t smiling.’” (Cunningham 191) Once again, I agree with all of Cunningham’s points. Whenever a woman does not have a smile on her face, people will tend to assume she is unhappy or angry about something. This may be why men feel prompted to tell random women to smile and act like they are doing those women a favor. Some people may argue that what guys do is completely innocent and they just want strangers to be happy, but men never seem to tell other men who are complete strangers to smile. Also, I found the story about her friend to be relatable. Sometimes when I have just a neutral expression on my face, my friends will ask me if anything is wrong because I “look upset.” Or my relatives will ask me the same
Unless the emotion is happiness, society wants women to hide their feelings. “Evidently, a woman’s happy, willing deference is something the world wants visibly demonstrated.” (Cunningham 191) She brings up how men will often come up to random women on the street who are not smiling and tell those women to smile, as if a random stranger’s facial expression is really that important to them. Cunningham recalls when a friend told her about an experience she had, “A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after class and asked, ‘What is wrong, dear? You sat there for the whole hour looking so sad!’ ‘All I could figure,’ my friend says now, ‘is that I wasn’t smiling.’” (Cunningham 191) Once again, I agree with all of Cunningham’s points. Whenever a woman does not have a smile on her face, people will tend to assume she is unhappy or angry about something. This may be why men feel prompted to tell random women to smile and act like they are doing those women a favor. Some people may argue that what guys do is completely innocent and they just want strangers to be happy, but men never seem to tell other men who are complete strangers to smile. Also, I found the story about her friend to be relatable. Sometimes when I have just a neutral expression on my face, my friends will ask me if anything is wrong because I “look upset.” Or my relatives will ask me the same