February 2022

By Rosemary Weatherston

Google “Why do men ask women to smile?” and you’ll return up to 949,000,000 results. In her book project, Smile for Your Lives, Women and Girls, Professor Emerita Dr. Elizabeth Hill attempts to explain why.

Guests at WGS’s 2021 virtual Feminist Scholarship Colloquium enjoyed a preview of Dr. Hill’s project, which was supported by a WGS Feminist Scholarship Grant.  These annual WGS grants are awarded to full-time, part-time, and adjunct faculty members to support scholarly work that critically examine the place of women and/or gender in culture and society.

In her project Dr. Hill uses theories and research from the field of evolutionary psychology to shed light on some of the reasons why some oppressive gender-based patterns in relations between the sexes may be resistant to change despite legal and social progress in other areas.

In her Colloquium presentation “Why Expect Women to Smile? An Evolutionary Explanation” Dr. Hill focused on the widespread expectation that women smile as an expression of obedience and submission. As she pointed out, there are many types of smiles, and only some express happiness.  Dr. Hill discussed the increasing prevalence in smiling in the U.S. society and the policing of powerful women’s facial expressions, such as the widespread attacks on Hillary Clinton’s “smirk” during her presidential campaigns. Dr. Hill also analyzed expressive patterns in primates for insights into how smiling became an expression to signal obedience to “dominant” individuals. Women’s smiling she explains, is often a response to fear of male anger; specifically, it can display subservience, a disposition to obedience. She argued that research from evolutionary psychology suggest that these expectations about obedient women stem from motivation to control women’s sexual behavior.

Dr. Hill’s talk intrigued audience members, and the subsequent discussion ranged from the #metoo movement, to the idea of “resting bitch face,” to how pandemic-related mask mandates might be impacting the ubiquitous expectation that women “smile, sweetheart.”