you've come a long way, baby-but you're not there yet

While many of the specific assertions of Wollstonecraft's treatise on the condition of women seem outdated and irrelevant, some of the things she criticizes are, sadly, as current as this morning's paper. Happily, other issues she addresses are relics of the bad old days; outdated modes of life no longer seen in most western society.
An example of the things that are not part of our lives as modern women is the need to pretend to be athletically and physically weak. Most modern marketing in the western world shows women with healthy, well developed bodies (with the admitted exception of fashion marketing, but even that has been trotted out as an example of archaic and abusive body imagery by both public and expert medical audiences). Strong, accomplishment-oriented women are now the norm in both real life and the media. This accomplishment also applies to educational norms as well in our modern age. Women in the current era, at least in western society, have recently been outstripping men in many cases in the academic world. Of course, women do not always receive equivalent pay or recognition for these accomplishments, but in general we find that this is something that our society feels that we should be working towards.
One problem that we do still see today is the unrealistic expectation put upon women to present themselves as perfectly charming and beautiful. Even in our our modern, "enlightened" American society, where women are expected to achieve physically, academically, and professionally on a par with their male counterparts, we still expect those women to be fashionable, with hair coiffed, shoes carefully chosen, and makeup flawlessly applied. We also expect that they will be attentive mothers, perfect housekeepers, and the sort of wives who add cache to their husband's career while managing social lives and charitable works of their own. This tendency to create an unrealistic image of what woman "should be" goes from one extreme to the next without ever abandoning the idea of a being who is at base, at all times, oriented toward an appearance. Try to remember the last time you saw a diet soda commercial specifically targeting a male audience, or a laundry detergent commercial. Recently we have begun to see personal hygiene products directed toward men, but where the same product aimed at a female audience would feature a woman whipping her head around to display a head of enviable hair, the male version shows a man being practically raped by a group of strange women without a hint of self control.
As I write this I am sitting here watching a special on the morning news about some supposed predilection women have for purchasing footwear. I think I have to call shenanigans on this one. While women have historically been encouraged to "cultivate a fondness for dress," I find it unlikely in the extreme that there is anything organic or natural to the kingdom fauna in women's desire to purchase shoes that throw the visual spotlight onto their reproductive faculties. More likely this is a mindless slavery to an artificially created modern archetype that was already being developed in Wollstonecraft's day of absurd corsetry and continues into our own marketing-driven visual-imagery based consumer society.