House-to-house canvassing and mail order permitted businesswomen with little capital or credit to expand their manufacturing operations. They reduced their risk and gained cash flow by defining sales agents as resellers, requiring them to purchase the goods, rather than take them on consignment or sell on a salary basis. Mail-order cosmetics firms kept relatively little inventory, manufacturing as orders came in. Madam Walker's business from the first “operated on a cash with order basis and very little capital has ever been necessary for its operation,” observed an Internal Revenue Service agent, puzzling over Walker's haphazard bookkeeping. Starting out in 1905, she had managed, in a mere thirteen years, to build a business with thousands of sales agents and annual gross sales of $275,000, a staggering success.17
Beauty culturists developed “systems” and “methods,” signature skin- and hair-care programs that facilitated, and subtly redefined, these distribution networks. Gone were miscellaneous creams and lotions, replaced by specialized and coordinated products and step-bystep techniques. Skin-care systems required cosmeticians to apply an array of cleansing and “nourishing” creams and to massage the face with wrinkle rollers, muscle beaters, or other devices; customers were encouraged to follow the program at home. Each product performed a single function, but together they became a therapeutic “treatment line” in a regular beauty ritual. Unlike powder or paint applied temporarily to the surface of the skin, such methods promised to assist nature and secure a lifetime of beauty.18
A promotion for facial vibrators from the Electric Supply Company, 1906.
A “face lift” device from Susanna Cocroft. Detail, “Success Face Lifters” pamphlet.
Systems were frequently taught through beauty schools and correspondence courses, replacing casual apprenticeships with formal training and certification in hairdressing and beauty culture. The first academy of hairdressing appeared in 1890, and over the next two decades beauty schools sprang up across the country, many of them founded by women. Among the earliest was Madame Le Fevre's school of dermatology, which trained fifty-seven women in one year to fulfill “her desire to establish competent women in business in cities and towns where she is not represented.”19
From the Poro Hair and Beauty Culture Handbook, 1922.
Madam C. J. Walker and others in an open touring car.
A number of entrepreneurs developed franchise operations in conjunction with beauty schools. These enabled certified beauticians to own salons, advertise their services as “system” shops, and capitalize upon the entrepreneur's name and reputation. Innovative beauty culturist Martha Matilda Harper, based in Rochester, New York, began to license her “Harper Method” in 1890 and eventually had more than 300 franchised salons. The Marinello Company, founded by Ruth Maurer, opened its first beauty school in 1904 and became one of the dominant organizations in the business, training white and black women and setting up franchises around the country. The Poro and Walker systems, and later Sara Spencer Washington's Apex, attracted thousands of black hairdressers as well, some of whom made the transition to proprietor. Although unrecognized by business historians, women entrepreneurs were in the vanguard of modern franchising methods that would take off more generally after World War II.20
Other women pioneered in the direct sales methods known today as multilevel marketing or “pyramid” organization. In addition to beauty services and product sales, agent-operators earned money and other rewards by recruiting women into their organization and training them in their specific beauty method. Entrepreneurial black women made this strategy highly successful. Malone and Walker traveled into every region of the country to teach women how to treat hair and sell products—remarkable journeys in this period of intensifying segregation and violence against black Americans. Their recruits trained others in turn, widening the circle of distribution. Sales agents fanned out to areas otherwise isolated from the consumer market. Walker's traveling representatives were instructed to “thoroly canvass Virginia, North and South Carolina,” and the Sea Islands, because “there are more Negroes and more money there than in all other states combined.” Like many direct-sales firms today, Malone rewarded agents not only with cash but with other incentives, bestowing diamond rings, low-cost mortgages, and public accolades for recruiting new agents, for becoming top sellers, and even for demonstrating thrift and charity. Led by compelling, larger-than-life personalities, these companies were early examples of what Nicole Biggart calls “charismatic capitalism,” institutions that combined the profit motive with the qualities of a social or even religious movement.21
Women in the beauty business faced a specific cultural dilemma as they promoted the consumption of cosmetics: How were they to champion products that to a large extent still signified female immorality, goods whose use consumers often denied? If beauty was a “duty,” as the prescriptive literature proclaimed, its achievement remained hedged about by women's embarrassment and anxiety about maintaining their good name. When she went into the beauty business in 1888, Mrs. Gervaise Graham observed, “Ladies went veiled to the Beauty Doctor, for fear of being ridiculed for their vanity.” Similarly Harriet Hubbard Ayer recalled “how amused I was to get orders for a simple emollient cream, with the request that it should be sent in a plain wrapper.”22
Men in the patent cosmetics and drugstore trade used two distinct appeals to induce women to buy beauty preparations. Patent cosmetics advertisements, like those for medicinal elixirs, featured sensational copy, dramatic before-and-after pictures, and promises of magical transformation. By 1900, retail and manufacturing druggists wished to separate themselves from such ballyhoo yet wondered how to handle women consumers—perceived as irrational and impulsive—in the growing market for cosmetics. With typical condescension, Chicago druggist B. S. Cooban described the problem, given cosmetics’ “miscellaneous character” and the exacting requirements of “the ‘dear creatures’ who are our chief patrons”:
Miracles are not only expected but demanded. To meet these demands and keep the girls, both old and young, in line, requires a great variety of stock, and the exercise of considerable judgement and tact in recommending articles for individual needs. And such needs! Did you ever take especial notice of the beauty troubles and tales of woe that women give you? How they will “roast” some powder or lotion!23
Promoting cosmetic wares as staple goods and toilet necessities, Cooban and other druggists advertised their intrinsic qualities, celebrated low prices, and provided instructions for use. Nonplussed by beauty and by women, they offered the dry, indulgent humor of the man behind the counter, the laconic language of “good enough,” and matterof-fact descriptions of their miscellaneous goods.
Women entrepreneurs hawked cosmetics in a different key. They called themselves beauty experts who identified with women's wants and desires, and often cited their own bodily trials and tribulations as the reason they had become manufacturers. Necessity was indeed the mother of invention. One turn-of-the-century beauty culturist, known as Madame Yale, often said that she had wanted to be a general physician until she had the “personal experience of the worst forms of female disease.” She healed herself, so she claimed, then decided to devote “her life-work to the benefit of her Sister