Hope in a Jar. Kathy Peiss

identification conferring instant legitimacy. Claiming authority through shared experience created a powerful link between producers and consumers, indeed, blurred the line between them.²⁴

      Women's anomalous place in the business world dictated this commercial strategy. After all, beauty expertise was deemed a natural form of female knowledge that women were expected to possess. Some businesswomen even hid their active experimentation with formulas and chemicals behind divine revelation. Madam C. J. Walker claimed she “had a dream” in which “a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair” and prophesied that she would beautify and uplift the race. French immigrant Marie Juliette Pinault, who had little else in common with Walker, also named a dream the inspiration for her products.²⁵

      These businesswomen shrewdly understood that their own personalities were business assets, integral to their sales strategies. They carefully crafted their self-images, creating distinct versions of femininity that resonated with the particular aspirations and social experiences of those they targeted as consumers. White beauty culturists often shed their names, hometowns, and social backgrounds to create personae as beauty experts. In a business dedicated to illusion and transformation, they were self-made. Madame Yale was, in fact, Maude Mayberg, who lied about receiving a degree from Wellesley College and whose other claims about formal training in chemistry, physical culture, and art are dubious. Poverty had “induced” Ida Lee Secrest “to take up the business,” and, carrying some cosmetics recipes given her by an uncle, she fled Chanute, Kansas, for New York City. There she became “cosmetic artiste” Madame Edith Velaro, literally her own creation, whose “eyebrows were artificial, her lashes dyed, her complexion made up, her eyes brightened and made to look large by one of her preparations.”²⁶

      Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein fashioned contrasting public personalities on which to base their cosmetics marketing. Arden, as a 1938 Fortune profile correctly observed, was “an alias concealing many things”—a chain of salons, a manufacturer, a sales corps, and, not least, Florence Nightingale Graham herself as she curried favor with elite society. “Arden pink” was her signature, coloring her apparel, salon interiors, and cosmetics packaging. Promotional letters under her name imitated her whispery, intimate speaking voice to create poetic pictures of youthful loveliness, considered models of “writing in woman's own language” in the advertising industry. Often described as a dithering, smiling figure, Arden undoubtedly exasperated the male executives around her. According to several reports, she was “fond of asking male advice on money and business, and almost invariably disregard[ed] it.” This criticism reflects less upon Arden's “unbusinesslike manner” than on the control she exerted over her image and the company. Pink femininity concealed Arden's acts as an exacting and tough manager who broke a threatened strike, fended off complaints from the Food and Drug Administration, and remained the sole stockholder of her company, despite several marriages and buyout offers.²⁷

      Rubinstein also adopted a high-society image but invoked elements of the New Woman. In her view, the beauty specialist was a professional woman, “who is human in her sympathies, and will express these sympathies thru [sic] science.” Typically photographed in a lab coat or striking dress and jewelry, she presented a dramatic figure of modernity—exotic, urbane, and scientific. Reporters often commented that Rubinstein, a Polish Jew, was “not a talker”—her speech was heavily accented—but also stressed her worldliness and sophistication: “a woman without a country who is at home in any country.” Characteristically, she took an inclusive view of beauty culture, welcoming “stenographers, clerks, and even little office girls” into her salon and acknowledging the variety of skin types in a nation of immigrants. Unlike Arden, who only flirted with the suffrage movement when it was fashionable, Rubinstein became a long-term supporter of women's equal rights.²⁸

      If white beauty culturists sloughed off their origins to perform the American myth of self-making and individual mobility, black entrepreneurs tended to embed their biographies within the story of African-American women's collective advancement. Madam Walker identified closely with the struggles and dignity of poor women even as she sought entrance into the ranks of the black economic and social elite. She had remade herself in certain ways, hiring a tutor in standard English and carefully fashioning a refined and elegant appearance. Still, she persistently tied her business to the fortunes of the unschooled and poor women whose life experiences she had shared. In 1912, she burst into public awareness when she attempted to address the National Negro Business League at its annual meeting. Booker T. Washington repeatedly refused to recognize her, apparently not wanting to endorse such a disreputable calling. Finally Walker rushed up to the podium, exclaiming “surely you are not going to shut the door in my face,” and launched into an impassioned speech. “I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub…then I was promoted to the cook kitchen,” she said emphatically, “and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.” Walker proved her mettle, and Washington welcomed her back the following year, when as a featured speaker she pointedly declaimed, “I am not ashamed of my past; I am not ashamed of my humble beginning. Don't think because you have to go down in the wash-tub that you are any less a lady!”²⁹

      The projection of personality and expertise was central to the sales strategies women entrepreneurs adopted. Many of them advertised their beauty culture systems in local newspapers, distributed trade cards, and sent pamphlets through the mail. Advertising, however, did not dominate their marketing efforts. Beauty culturists placed relatively few advertisements, for example, in the national women's magazines then gaining popularity. Perhaps the cost of ad space was prohibitive. Then, too, some women's magazines banned ads for “quack” beauty cures, and none carried advertising from black-owned companies. At the same time, businesswomen's orientation to localism—apparent in their salons and door-to-door operations—may have disposed them against the type of advertising campaigns mounted by soap companies, packaged goods producers, and other manufacturers. Instead, beauty entrepreneurs concentrated on women's aesthetic and cultural practices, weaving their trade into the fabric of women's everyday lives. Addressing a heterogeneous public split along racial, class, and regional lines, they devised new forms of female interaction to create a sociable commerce in beautifying.