Legally Blonde: Feminism in pink

Chick Flicks, Stereotypes, and Legally Blonde

A stereotype that everyone has heard of at least once is probably the 'dumb blonde.' She's feminine, ditzy, popular, pretty, loves fashion, and, more often than not, loves the color pink. The perfect examples of this is Karen Smith from the original Mean Girls movie, or Penny from The Big Bang Theory. The early 2000s saw the rise of tropes like the high school mean girl (Mean Girls) and the nerdy girl makeover (Mean Girls, The Princess Diaries). But amidst the Regina Georges and Karen Smiths, another famous blond made her way to the forefront of teen cinema. Elle Woods.

Elle Woods: The Intelligent Blonde

When we first meet Elle, she's living her best life - she's the president of her sorority at UCLA, she's got great girl friends, her adorable dog and the perfect boyfriend. She's got everything she could ever want! Until she doesn't. Her boyfriend, Warner, breaks up with her, because she's, in his opinion, too silly and ditzy. If he wants to be a senator, he needs, in his words, "A Jackie [Kennedy], not a Marilyn [Monroe]."

Elle hatches a plan to go to Harvard Law School, and prove to Warner she's serious enough for him. This immediately shatters the dumb blond stereotype, with her getting an incredibly high score on her LSAT. Immediately, she is underestimated and ridiculed by her law classmates. Her hyperfeminine nature is considered equivalent to her lacking substance and being a ditz. This image is propagated with her being underprepared for her first lessons.

However, we see throughout the movie that as she studies and learns, she becomes equally as well-versed and law-smart as her peers. We see her helping her friend regain custody of her dog, and even see her getting awarded an internship at the law firm of her professor, Callahan. She's no longer doing this for Warner. She has realized a true passion for law.

However, we soon find that Callahan only awarded Elle the internship because of her looks, even hitting on her, one of his students in the office. For Elle, this is seen as a breaking point. The internship is, at that point, the biggest accomplishment of her law career. She has tried so hard throughout the movie to be taken seriously by the people around her, but realises that her biggest accomplishment wasn't because of her hard work but because of her looks, making this her breaking point.

Femininity and Intelligence: Mutually Exclusive?

Throughout the movie, we see through Elle's fashion choice, her slowly losing or hiding her hyperfeminine side, as she becomes taken more seriously. Her bright pink is replaced with black suits. It seems like femininity and intelligence can't cross much, with her losing the things that made her ostracized by her peers, things that made her herself. That makes it all the more powerful, in the iconic courtroom scene, when she enters in a hot pink dress, when she's decided that being underestimated by Callahan won't keep her from achieving her law dream.

One thing that some people may take issue with is how Elle solves the case not through her knowledge of law, but of perms. However, I think this makes the scene more powerful. We've seen before that Elle understands law. But with her knowledge of hair products being the final piece that helped her solve the case? That is information that other members of her law team wouldn't have had, information that shows her feminine nature isn't a disadvantage, but the very thing that won her the case. This shows that femininity and intelligence aren't mutually exclusive, but can go hand in hand, completely shattering the dumb blond stereotype.

Stereotype Shattered

While Legally Blonde isn't full stereotype free, with the portrayal of LGBTQIA+ characters being quite stereotyped, it does a good job shattering the stereotype that Elle's kind of protagonist usually has. With the movie having been released 25 years ago, it was new and a great idea. Most movies make the intelligent, feminist character angry and tomboyish, like Kat from Ten Things I Hate About You, or Sasha, at the beginning of the Barbie Movie. That makes it so important that an iconic character shows femininity, feminism and intelligence going hand in hand with each other.