There are a handful of friends and colleagues to whom I owe special thanks. Susan Porter Benson, Daniel Horowitz, Roy Rosenzweig, and Susan Strasser all read an earlier version of the entire manuscript and generously gave me their criticism and advice. Steve Fraser also offered early support and a careful reading. I came to a better understanding of my work in lively conversations with Victoria de Grazia, spirited dinners with Barbara Clark Smith, Daniel Bluestone, and Hattie Smith, and an ongoing friendship with Judith Gerson. Thanks also to Larry and Maggie Malley, who took good care of me during research trips to Duke.
Two individuals gave an extraordinary amount of time and effort to helping me write the book I wanted to write. My editor, Sara Bershtel, is remarkable: Her close reading of the manuscript has challenged me as a writer, even as her enthusiasm has kept me going. I was dubious when she said we were going to have fun, but she was right.
My husband, Peter Agree, probably knows more about cosmetics than any man outside the beauty industry. Throughout he has been cornerman and wordsmith, adviser and soul mate. Every page of this book bears some trace of his commitment and involvement; these few words of acknowledgment cannot express the intensity of my gratitude to him.
Greenfield, Massachusetts
September 1997
Introduction
In 1938 the cosmetics firm Volupté introduced two new lipsticks. Mademoiselle magazine explained that one was for “girls who lean toward pale-lacquered nails, quiet smart clothes and tiny strands of pearls,” the other “for the girl who loves exciting clothes, pins a strass [paste] pin big as a saucer to her dress, and likes to be just a leetle bit shocking.” One had a “soft mat finish” while the other covered the lips “with a gleaming lustre.” The names of these lipsticks were Lady and Hussy. As Mademoiselle put it, “Each of these two categories being as much a matter of mood as a matter of fact, we leave you to decide which you prefer to be.”1
The assumptions behind this promotion are arresting. For nineteenth-century Americans, lady and hussy were polar opposites—the best and worst of womanhood—and the presence or absence of cosmetics marked the divide. Reddened cheeks and darkened eyelids were signs of female vice, and the “painted woman” provoked disgust and censure from the virtuous. But by the 1930s, lady and hussy had become “types” and “moods.” Female identities once fixed by parentage, class position, social etiquette, and sexual codes were now released from small swiveling cylinders. Where “paint” implied a concealing mask, the term “makeup,” in common usage by the 1920s, connoted a medium of self-expression in a consumer society where identity had become a purchasable style. Women could choose the look of gentlewoman or prostitute—and apparently Hussy outsold Lady five to one!
Lady and Hussy lipsticks mark a sea change, not only in the meaning of cosmetics, but in conceptions of women's appearance and identity. How did this fundamental transformation take place? How did a sign of disrepute become the daily routine of millions? And how did a “kitchen physic,” as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a mass market industry?
Small objects sometimes possess great moral force, and the usual answers to these questions have been charged with disapproval and criticism. Cosmetics have been condemned as symptomatic of all that is wrong in modern consumer society: Their producers create false needs, manipulate fears and desires, and elevate superficiality over substance, all to sell overpriced goods that do not deliver on their promises. Today the most formidable judgments about cosmetics often come from feminists who, since the 1960s, have argued that powerful male-dominated consumer industries and mass media have been a leading cause of women's oppression. In this view, the beauty industry has added to, even to some extent supplanted, the legal and economic discriminations that have for so long subordinated women. Manufactured images of ideal beauty and supermodel glamour have come to dominate women's consciousness. And the act of beautifying, though it seems enticing and freely chosen, is really compulsory work, so narcissistic, time-consuming, and absorbing as to limit women's achievements.2
To many critics, the story begins and ends there. But this view is partial and, in many respects, wrong. For one thing, this business for women was largely built by women. In the early stages of the developing cosmetics industry, from the 1890s to the 1920s, women formulated and organized “beauty culture” to a remarkable extent. The very notion of femininity, emphasizing women's innate taste for beauty, opened opportunities for women in this business, even as it restricted them elsewhere. And women seized their chances, becoming entrepreneurs, inventors, manufacturers, distributors, and promoters. Handicapped in pursuing standard business practices, they resourcefully founded salons, beauty schools, correspondence courses, and mail-order companies; they pioneered in the development of modern franchising and direct-sales marketing strategies. The beauty trade they developed did not depend upon advertising as its impetus. Rather, it capitalized on patterns of women's social life—their old customs of visiting, conversation, and religious observance, as well as their new presence in shops, clubs, and theaters.
Strikingly, many of the most successful entrepreneurs were immigrant, working-class, or black women. Coming from poor, socially marginal backgrounds, they played a surprisingly central role in redefining mainstream ideals of beauty and femininity in the twentieth century. Focusing new attention on the face and figure, they made the pursuit of beauty visible and respectable. In many ways, they set the stage for Madison Avenue, whose narrowly drawn images of flawless beauty bombard us today. But before the rise of the mass market, these early businesswomen served up a variety of visions of womanly beauty. Elizabeth Arden was a Canadian immigrant and “working girl” who remade herself into a symbol of haute femininity; she carved a “class market” for cosmetics by catering to the social prestige and power of wealthy and upwardly mobile white women. In contrast, such black entrepreneurs as Madam C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone promoted a form of beauty culture entwined in the everyday lives of poor African-American women. They consciously created job opportunities for women, addressed the politics of appearance, and committed their profits to their community. Indeed, the history of these businesswomen flatly contradicts the view that the beauty industry worked only against women's interests.
What about the women who bought and used beauty products? Cosmetics have often figured in the old stereotype of women as vain and foolish, a stereotype contemporary critics too often reinforce. How could a rational being eat arsenic to improve her complexion, spread hormones on her face, believe promises of a wrinkle-free future, and pay exorbitant prices for an ounce of prevention?
Answering these questions requires us to listen more closely to women's own voices and to consider how they understood beautifying in their own lives. Remarkably, women from across the country, from different social classes and racial-ethnic groups, enthusiastically embraced cosmetics—especially makeup—in the early twentieth century. This acceptance was no mere fad or fashion, but a larger change in the way women perceived their identities and displayed them on the face and body. For some, cosmetics use quickly became a self-diminishing habit: Women reported as early as the 1930s that advertising and social pressures to be attractive lowered their self-esteem. Others, however, boldly applied their lipsticks in public and asserted their right to self-creation through the “makeover” of self-image.
Today the possibility of transformation through cosmetics is often belittled as a delusion, “hope in a jar” that only masks the fact