Lee Radziwill and the Cinderella trap

Lee Radziwill knew that she would always be "the sister of" – that no mention of her, no matter what she would have accomplished – could never appear without recognizing her much more famous sister. and dazzling. And now, even at death, Radziwill passes behind Jackie Kennedy again, because almost all the tributes that are paid to him seem to consider Lee's life solely through the lens of this fraternal relationship. "We will always remember her for her style and her relationship with her older sister," wrote United States today. "She only realized pale reflections from the projector on her sister," said New York Time opined. Vanity Fair magazine, valiantly trying to pay him his dues, called Lee "an icon" – but added "on his own", that revealing phrase that always means his own opposite.

Lee remained locked up all his life in the fight for "his own right". Even in 1976, when his great friend (later enemy), Truman Capote, had attempted to hire Radziwill, he could only do so with a scathing remark about his sister. : "It's all that people attribute to Jackie," he says People, "All looks, style, taste – Jackie never got them, and yet it's Lee who lived in the shadows."

If it was just the unhappiness of a woman's personal life, we could lament it and move on. But the media coverage of Lee Radziwill's death highlights a much bigger problem: our tendency to view femininity as a zero-sum game – my gain is your loss. These goals show how natural it is to imagine that women spend their lives in rivalry, arguing who is the most beautiful, whose richest or most powerful husband, who is the most glamorous, etc. the stories describe the rivalry between Jackie and Lee.

Lee Radziwill has excelled in almost every category required by traditional femininity: Looks? Check. It was a photogenic beauty: high cheekbones and carved, wide-eyed, delicate features. Slimming? Check. Lee, a sylph, kept the silhouette of his model until the last day. Elegance? Recheck. Lee was a fashion icon and had flawless air in her designer wardrobe. Get married well? Lee wins a check, in addition to becoming a princess, like Cinderella, when she married her second husband (out of three), Polish emigrant, Prince Stanislaus Radziwill.

But according to Lee's story for a long time, Sister Jackie beat her in all these categories. And not only did Jackie see the Prince of Lee and elevate her president, she might well have "expropriated" Lee's Aristotle Onassis, to borrow a term borrowed from Radziwill's biographer, Diana DuBois (who l. called bio). In the shadow of his sister). According to this famous theory, Lee had an affair with Onassis and was caught off guard when the billionaire (to whom she had introduced Jackie) had shifted her attention and ended up marrying her sister, making Jackie one of the women the richest people in the world.

Lee's achievements were in keeping with his generation and class. We know that Janet Bouvier, their mother, raised her daughters in the interest of turning them into exemplary women for rich men. In that, she succeeded. In all respects, and despite the real tragedies that marked Lee and Jackie's adult life (Lee lost his son Anthony from cancer in 1996), both girls achieved the classic goals of successful femininity in the upper class: being attractive, showing grace, cultivating the arts, attracting and marrying men who gave them status and security.

But if both deserve the Cinderella prize, they can not keep it at the same time, it seems. Lee's life must be considered a failure compared to that of his sister. We must make ourselves understood that his star shines more weakly. Why? Because this kind of intra-feminine rivalry is actually woven into the story of Cinderella, which has long been the touchstone, the founding narrative of female success.

What makes Cinderella such a fascinating story is not the prince but these evil half-sisters and step-mothers. Without the rivalry between women, Cinderella would seem less worthy of our sympathy. The half-sisters' ugliness and despair highlight the beauty and virtue of Cinderella. We are rooting against them and for her. Note that no such competition exists between the men of the story. We know little about the prince if it is that he is handsome, let alone his father, the king. Men are bitten. The real drama – as always – is with women.

If you think that this centuries-old fairy tale is unrelated to modern femininity, think about how Cinderella remains a living and everyday component of our own popular culture. Cinderella is the underlying structure of all beauty contests (who will be crowned the most beautiful?); all dances back in high schools and colleges; TV shows like The single person; and reality TV franchises like Real housewives, in which groups of carefully prepared women are fighting endlessly. There is even a direct link between Real housewives and Lee Radziwill: Carole Radziwill, Lee's daughter-in-law, Anthony's widow, is part of the cast Real housewives from New York, where its proximity to the real world with royalty (or ancient royalty, Lee gave up its title) confers glamor to the rest of the cast. And, of course, Cinderella's basic story is implicit in all of Lee Radziwill's obituaries, with Jackie wearing the metaphorical glass slipper each time.

Dressing women against each other and evaluating them as so many candidates for the beauty pageant is so natural and ubiquitous that it can become invisible. We can be blind to the presumptions of Cinderella all around us, which can affect women of all types at any time. When Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer delivered a speech about her state's infrastructure, she was attacked for the style and cut of her blue dress. She did not win the Cinderella prize. As for the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whatever the policy she approves or the legislation she supports, she is regularly attacked on the classic fronts of Cinderella: her outfits, her dance and, more recently, her boyfriend . Sometimes, we always hand out the Cinderella Prize, as we do practically in all the stories of Meghan Markle, who is constantly praised for her style and grace – but really for becoming the Duchess of Sussex, for winning a prince. (Meghan even has a naughty naughty sister, Samantha, who appears periodically to spice up the story.)

It is extremely difficult for women to escape the universalizing quality of Cinderella's story. Whatever our achievements, a tsunami of cultural information tells us every day that we are all lined up at the ball, in an endless competition for that moment of princely recognition, the moment of being chosen, the moment when we go beyond our sisters. One of my students told me that each new semester, she could not help to evaluate the beauty of all her classmates and to rank among them. I understood. In my youth, an older relative advised me never to have girlfriends more attractive than me, so as not to risk losing their potential contenders.

Let's mourn Lee Radziwill, a dynamic, multi-talented, intelligent and admirable woman. But let us also take this opportunity to consider How we admire women in general and the ease with which we can all internalize and succumb to Cinderella's stories of female competition and resentment – as perhaps Lee and Jackie did in their lifetime.

Let's get out of the composition of the ballroom.