The women most stigmatized by their use of makeup—prostitutes—were no longer so easily identified by it. Traditionally, women who became prostitutes abandoned their corsets, put on loose fitting robes, and made up their faces to advertise their trade. A reformed prostitute, telling her story of brothel life, however, said she had refused to apply makeup—“I had to draw a line somewhere”—rouge and eye paint being the most potent sign of her fall. A prostitute's appearance also depended on her place within an intricate vice economy and on the vagaries of urban policing. Streetwalkers wore makeup to attract the glances of likely customers, but some shunned it to avoid scrutiny from the cop on the beat. The “street girls” of Syracuse, a 1913 investigation found, “dress quietly, and use but little paint or powder.” Even brothel dwellers, sheltered within a house, used different elements of contemporary fashion and style to signal their occupation and sense of group identity. Some wore short skirts and boots; others—usually high-priced courtesans—often imitated ladies of fashion and spent extravagantly on modistes, hairdressers, and perfume. Turn-of-the-century prostitutes wore kohl on their eyes when they posed for New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq, but a delivery boy in the Storyville brothels pinpointed a finer distinction between the worlds of vice and virtue: “Prostitutes wore night-time makeup at the wrong time of day.”34
It was not only prostitutes whose appearances confused. Cosmetics had long been associated with “fast” and “sporting” women. Neither prostitutes nor performers, these women enjoyed the city's underworld as pleasure seekers, their bold dress and free-and-easy manners conspicuous in dance houses, concert halls, and cafés. At various moments in the nineteenth century, some women tested the limits of bourgeois propriety by wearing fashions that referenced this demimonde. Makeup was an especially plastic aesthetic form—easily heightened, toned down, or washed off to register one's place within different social circles. As more and more women entered into the expanding realm of urban commercial nightlife, they made elements of this racy public style their own.
But however indebted to the demimonde, this trend toward painting was part of a historic transformation in feminine appearance affecting women of different classes and cultural backgrounds. Saleswomen, factory hands, middle-class shoppers, and socialites all began to paint, although journalists and commentators pointed especially to society women and working girls as the chief offenders. “Society women now paint” even in “very select circles,” read a New York World headline as early as 1890. Despite the “tradition that ‘making up’ is tabooed in the best New York society,” stated the reporter, “it is the very best upper-crustdom that puts aside tradition and authority and bedizens itself as much as it pleases.” Nodding to trendsetting French women who used visible makeup, some asserted their social leadership within the haute monde through cosmetic fashion.35
Assertive young working women were also known for their makeup use. Decked out in cheap but fashionable clothes and hats, they wore switches and “puffs” in their hair, powdered generously, and even rouged their cheeks. For many, being up-to-date included cosmetics, even though they were sometimes sent home for powdering excessively or harassed by men on the streets, who saw them as loose. “Tough girls”—white working-class women thought to be uninhibited and sexually active—especially embraced the theatrical qualities of cosmetics. Urban reformers commented on the “almost universal custom” at dance halls, where young working women stored powder puffs in their stocking tops, pulled them out and flourished them whenever they wished “to attract the attention of a young man.”36
Women were using makeup to mark any number of differences, asserting worldliness against insularity and sexual desire against chastity. Moving into public life, they staked a claim to public attention, demanded that others look. This was not a fashion dictated by Parisian or other authorities, but a new mode of feminine self-presentation, a tiny yet resonant sign of a larger cultural contest over women's identity.
Still, painted women remained spectacles to a significant extent before World War I, conspicuous among the curiosities and commotion of urban life. “I have seen women going along the street with their cheeks aglow with paint, everyone twisting their necks and looking,” one woman observed. Working women were sent home for appearing on the job with an “artificial complexion”; the manager of Macy's fired one rouged saleswoman in 1913 with the comment that “he was not running a theatrical troupe but a department store.” Public authorities tried in vain to preserve the older ideal of womanly beauty. In 1915, a Kansas legislator proposed to make it a misdemeanor for women under the age of forty-four to wear cosmetics “for the purpose of creating a false impression.” Several years later, policewomen in Newark collared teenage girls at the train stations, “overawed them by a display of their police badges, and forced them to wash rouge and powder from their faces.” Juvenile courts granted parental requests to bar their delinquent daughters from making up. In these circumstances, paint still implied sexual enticement and trickery, a false face.37
Men in particular maintained these conventional views. Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, observed in 1912 that men continued to see rouge as a mark of sex and sin: “The stigma has never been removed by men, and is not, in their minds, today.” Letters to the Baltimore Sun from male readers confirm his observation. “Such decorating is the same as an invitation to a flirtation,” one man stated flatly. “Every painted or flashily dressed woman is deemed by most strange men to be of questionable character.” In an expanding consumer culture, these small goods posed yet another danger. One Evansville, Indiana, man sued for divorce, claiming his wife spent eighteen dollars monthly on cosmetics and perfume; another denied responsibility when his wife charged $1,500 for toiletries on their store account, saying she was “possessed of a passion for such luxuries.” The old notion of cosmetics as witchcraft lay just below the surface.38
Among women, painting aroused a more ambivalent response. Edward Bok peevishly commented that respectable “women have done a curious thing” by now tolerating painted women they once had shunned. A class of young working women at New York's Cooper Union in 1914 debated the question of artificial beauty and resoundingly voted in favor of it.39 But when the Baltimore Sun ran a contest asking “Should Women Paint?” women answered in the negative by over two to one. The female opponents of makeup essentially reiterated the charges made by men, but with greater urgency, for it was their respectability that painting called into question. Makeup certainly attracted attention, “but not the kind that a good woman wishes bestowed upon her,” said one woman. “Maidenly dignity is underestimated 50 per cent by her penciled lashes and over-dyed cheeks and lips,” which emboldened men to harass women, observed another. Women's motives for making up also came under scrutiny: When girls posed as mature women or matrons affected a youthful appearance, they both used subterfuge to ensnare men. Most writers agreed that makeup's artifice was ultimately self-deception. “Aids to beauty are only shams,” wrote Jessie Barclay. “Everybody can detect them.” A number echoed the nineteenth-century ideal that true beauty resulted from “right living and right thinking.” As one letter writer proposed, “Why not be satisfied with ourselves just as we are?”40
The champions of paint rejected excessive coloring but condoned the cautious imitation of nature. They too left unchallenged the assumption that women's virtue and beauty were intertwined, but argued from it that women's moral duty to be attractive justified moderate artifice. Women's intentions and authenticity, not makeup itself, determined the harm or innocence of the painted face. As one of the Cooper Union debaters argued, “If you use cosmetics in a nice way they will not detract from your beauty or injure your character.”41
Here were some very fine distinctions. The Sun contest winner, Nicketti McMullen, wrote about the difference between