Although commercial beauty culture mainly offered women lowwage work, it became one of a handful of occupations—along with dressmaking and millinery—to sustain female entrepreneurship and ownership. Ironically, the feminine stereotypes that rendered women unfit for the world of commerce validated their endeavors in the beauty business. Promoters proclaimed that “no profession is more suitable for women, or more pleasant, than that of helping others to become beautiful and youthful in appearance.” Some, like Mary Williams, became salon proprietors. The daughter of slaves who had bought their freedom, Williams learned the hair trade after the Civil War and opened a shop in Columbus, Ohio, in 1872. Serving both white and black residents, Williams eventually ran the “leading hair-dressing establishment in the city,” sold hair goods, and taught the trade to other African-American women.2
Women also became inventors, manufacturers, and distributors of beauty products. The full extent of their business activity remains unknown. Still, the U.S. Patent Office recorded the efforts of many women bent on achieving success selling cosmetics. They patented improved complexion creams, combs to straighten or curl hair, and clever devices to carry powder or dispense rouge. Most often women sought trademark protection for their products. From 1890 to 1924, they registered at least 450 trademarks for beauty preparations, the bulk of them after 1910. These confident inventors and manufacturers probably represent only a fraction of all the women who peddled their own formulas to neighbors or sold them in local salons. Many filed papers with the Patent Office years after they had put their product into use; only when they perceived a market for it, or faced imitators, did they choose to register the trademark.3
Beauty entrepreneurs came from all walks of life. Some of the more affluent had found themselves caught between women's new educational opportunities and ongoing sex discrimination in employment, especially in the sciences. Anna D. Adams aspired to be a surgeon, Marie Mott Gage a chemist. Adams abandoned her career in surgery when faced with the prejudice of male physicians, became a professor of chemistry, and eventually founded a chain of beauty parlors. Gage, who grew up in a family of doctors, studied chemistry at Vassar, but by the 1890s was writing beauty manuals and manufacturing products for the “scientific cultivation of physical beauty.”4
A few women from wealthy or middle-class families turned to beauty culture in desperation, when circumstances forced them to support themselves. Harriet Hubbard Ayer, one of the first women to establish a large cosmetics manufacturing operation, was born into a prosperous Chicago family in 1849 and married the son of a wealthy iron dealer at age sixteen. For a time she lived the life of a society matron, but growing marital conflicts and her husband's business failure led Harriet to divorce him in 1886. As sole support of her children, she took a series of jobs, then moved to New York and began manufacturing a face cream named after Madame Recamier, a French beauty of the Napoleonic era. “Not a vulgar white wash” but “intended to replace the so-called blooms and enamels,” Recamier cream proved a success. “Within a month,” a contemporary account observed, “the house was filled from top to bottom with women trying to manufacture toiletries fast enough to meet the public demand.” Ayer traded upon her elite connections to elicit rare endorsements from prominent society women and gain display space in department stores.5
Most women entrepreneurs, however, started out in less fortunate circumstances. They were farm daughters and domestic servants, immigrants and African Americans, ordinary, often poor women. They lived all over the country, in cities, small towns, and rural backwaters. From socially marginal origins, they risked little going into a business whose reputation remained dubious. Traces of their local or regional exploits exist only in old fliers, ads, and patent records. But even those who became most successful, who shaped the national development of the modern cosmetics industry, often started out poor and disadvantaged.
Elizabeth Arden in the 1920s.
Helena Rubinstein in the 1920s. (Photograph by Hal Phyfe)
Florence Nightingale Graham was born around 1878, some time after her parents had emigrated from England to become tenant farmers in Canada. Little is known about her early life, except that Florence grew up in poverty and had a limited education. As a young woman, she took one low-paying job after another, in turn a dental assistant, cashier, and stenographer. Following her brother to New York City in 1908, Florence found work in Eleanor Adair's high-priced beauty salon, first as a receptionist and then as a “treatment girl” specializing in facials. To better serve the wealthy patrons, Graham taught herself to speak with proper diction and to project an image of upper-crust Protestant femininity. A year later, she joined cosmetologist Elizabeth Hubbard in opening a Fifth Avenue salon. Their partnership quickly dissolved and Graham bought the shop, decorated it lavishly for an elite clientele, and, improving on Hubbard's formulas, developed her own Venetian line of beauty preparations. When she reopened the salon, she took the name Elizabeth Arden, one she considered romantic and high class.6
In contrast, Helena Rubinstein had already achieved considerable success by the time she arrived in the United States. The facts of her early life, like Arden's, have been obscured in a haze of publicity notices. In the 1920s and 1930s, she claimed to have been born into a wealthy family of exporters, taken advanced scientific and medical training at prestigious European universities, and obtained her winning skin cream from the famed actress Modjeska. Her 1965 autobiography and other sources present a somewhat different picture. Born in 1871, Rubinstein came from a middling Jewish family, her father a wholesale food broker in Cracow. Helena's medical education ended after two years when her parents, apparently opposed to her fiancé, sent her to live with relatives in Australia. In the 1890s, she worked as a governess and perhaps as a waitress. The cream used in her family had been made by a Hungarian chemist and relative, Jacob Lykusky, who taught her the simple beauty techniques she ultimately capitalized upon: cold cream to cleanse the face, astringent to close the pores, and vanishing cream to moisturize and protect the skin. Her friends clamored for the cream, and Rubinstein began to sell it. Finally she opened a beauty shop in 1900, using money lent her by a woman she had befriended on the passage to Australia.7
Within two years Rubinstein had become a success. She moved to London in 1908, opened a salon in Paris in 1912, and when war erupted in Europe, relocated to New York and opened a salon off Fifth Avenue, not far from Elizabeth Arden. There the two rivals warred for leadership in the high-status beauty trade. Disdainfully referring to each other as “that woman,” they refused to acknowledge how much they had in common—their troubled family life, economic insecurity, string of typical female jobs, their immigrant status, and not least, the acts of self-making they performed to become cosmetics entrepreneurs.
Annie Turnbo and Sarah Breedlove also found in the beauty trade an escape from poverty and marginalization, an outlet for entrepreneurial ambition. Born in 1869 and orphaned as a child, Annie Turnbo lived with her older siblings in Metropolis, Illinois, a small border town on the Ohio River. She received an education, taught Sunday school, and joined the temperance movement, but how she earned a living as a young woman is unknown. As a girl Turnbo learned plant lore by “gathering herbs with an old woman relative of mine…an herb doctor [whose] mixtures fascinated me.” In the 1890s she began experimenting with preparations to help black women like herself care for their hair and scalp. Many of them needed remedies for such common problems as hair loss, breakage, and tetter, a common skin ailment, but women also considered lush, well-groomed hair a sign of beauty. By 1900 Turnbo had produced a hair treatment containing sage and egg rinses, common substances in the folk cosmetic tradition. In that year she and her sister moved to Lovejoy, Illinois, a river town inhabited only by African Americans. They began to manufacture the product Turnbo called Wonderful Hair Grower and canvassed door