Beauty culture, then, should be understood not only as a type of commerce but as a system of meaning that helped women navigate the changing conditions of modern social experience. “Modernity” is, to be sure, a slippery concept. It describes the paradoxical effects of an urban, capitalist order—its rationalized work, bureaucracy, and efficiency, on the one hand, its fleeting encounters, self-consciousness, and continuous novelty, on the other. Women's rendezvous with modernity brought them into a public realm that was not always welcoming.3
Their changing status as workers, citizens, consumers, and pleasure seekers was acknowledged cosmetically: During the nineteenth century, the “public woman” was a painted prostitute; by its end, women from all walks of life were “going public”: Women crowded onto trolleys, promenaded the streets, frequented the theaters, and shopped in the new palaces of consumption. They found jobs not only in the traditional work of domestic service, sewing, and farming, but also in offices, stores, and other urban occupations that required new kinds of face-to-face interactions. A new “marriage market” substituted dating for courtship, and the dance hall for the front porch; a new sense of sexual freedom emerged.
For women experiencing these social changes, the act of beautifying often became a lightning rod for larger conflicts over female autonomy and social roles. Among white women, for example, popular concern centered on the morality of visible makeup—rouge, lipstick, mascara, and eye shadow. In the black community, beauty culture was explicitly a political issue, long before the contemporary feminist movement made it so. Skin whiteners and hair straighteners were the tokens in a heated debate: Against charges of white emulation and self-loathing, many black women invoked their rights to social participation and cultural legitimacy precisely through their use of beauty aids.
Still, for all the efforts to fix the meaning of cosmetics in relation to beauty standards, ideals of femininity, profit-making, and politics, the significance of these substances remains elusive. What do women declare when they “put on a face”? Is making up an act of deception, a confirmation of “natural” female identity, a self-conscious “put-on”? By the light of today's TV shopping channels, as celebrities hawk their cosmetic lines, it may seem that the promise of beauty is nothing but a commercial myth that binds women to its costly pursuit. Critics are not wrong to address the power of corporations, advertisers, and mass media to foster and profit from this myth. But they have overlooked the web of intimate rituals, social relationships, and female institutions that gave form to American beauty culture. Over the decades, mothers and daughters have taught each other about cosmetics, cliques have formed around looks, women have shared their beauty secrets and, in the process, created intimacy. Not only tools of deception and illusion, then, these little jars tell a rich history of women's ambition, pleasure, and community.
Masks and Faces
A sociable Victorian woman, just eighteen years old, developed a sunburn at a charity garden party, “when for a moment I stood without raising my sunshade to the direct glare of the sun.” Her friend Abigail sent her a recipe to relieve the “troublesome redness,” with the assurance “that she had tried it and that it had proved most satisfying.” The instructions read: “To a pint of white wine vinegar put a full handful of well-sifted wheat bran, steeping it for several hours and adding the yolks of five eggs with two grains of ambergris. Distill and bottle for fourteen days.” If she used the mixture, “a polished whiteness of the complexion will ensue.” So wrote a proper young lady of the 1860s in her book of beauty secrets, marked “private papers” and found years later by her niece.1
The recipe captures much of what was distinctive about cosmetics in the nineteenth century, before the rise of a mass beauty industry. At that time, most American women did not wear visible face makeup, although they avidly sought recipes to improve their complexions and achieve the ideal of white, genteel beauty. Following her friend's instructions, this young woman would have found all the ingredients but one in the kitchen; a druggist would have supplied the ambergris, used in perfumes as a fixative. The recipe itself supposedly originated long ago in a Spanish royal court and, like many nineteenth-century “beauty secrets,” boasted an old pedigree.
In contrast, “Mary C.,” a St. Louis housewife, chose to lighten and beautify her complexion by “painting” her skin. At age twenty-four, she began applying a commercial skin lightener, Laird's Bloom of Youth, to her face, influenced, perhaps, by illustrated advertisements that promised beauty, wealth, and social power: “With this essential a lady appears handsome, even if her features are not perfect.” In 1877, she was admitted to the St. Louis Female Hospital, her arms paralyzed from the elbows down. At first, she denied using hair dyes or cosmetics and was released, only to be readmitted sixteen months later in worsened condition. Finally she confessed that she had been applying Bloom of Youth for years. Moreover, she said that after her first hospital stay a lady had advised her to mix “a quarter of a pound of white flake and two ounces of glycerine” as a skin lightener. Alternating this mixture with a bottle of Bloom of Youth, she made the two preparations last “generally about three weeks.” Not long thereafter, Mary C. died of lead poisoning. Publishing the case in a medical journal, her physician condemned women's vanity as he exposed a dangerous commercial product.2
These two women had much in common in their pursuit of beauty: They desired a lighter complexion, mixed their own preparations—and tried to conceal their behavior. Choosing a homemade whitening lotion or a commercially manufactured lead-based paint, however, carried different implications. In the nineteenth century, Americans insisted on a fundamental distinction between skin-improving and skin-masking substances. The word cosmetic usually referred to creams, lotions, and other substances that acted on the skin to protect and correct it. Paints and enamels, in contrast, were white and tinted liquids, mainly produced commercially, that covered the skin. “Paints must not be confounded with Cosmetics, which often really do impart whiteness, freshness, suppleness, and brilliancy to the skin,” instructed one writer; “these consequently assist Nature, and make amends for her defects.” Paints, however, masked Nature's handiwork to hide expression and truth behind an “encrusted mould,” a “mummy surface.”3 Depending on their composition, face powders were identified either as paint or cosmetic; starch and rice powders were often used as skin protectors, while lead-based powders were classified as paints. Tinted powders and paints were highly controversial materials that aroused social, ethical, and health concerns. Skin-improving cosmetics were not: From urban ladies to farm wives, women were familiar with these substances as part of their knowledge of beauty and the body.
George W. Laird Co., Bloom of Youth Advertisement, around 1870.
Nineteenth-century American women inherited a tradition of cosmetic preparation, which freely borrowed from a variety of sources and reached back through the centuries. Englishwomen in the 1600s and 1700s knew “cosmetical physic,” as it was called, just as they understood how to cook, preserve, garden, and care for the sick. Blending housewifery, therapeutics, and aesthetics, cosmetic preparation was a branch of useful knowledge women were expected to master. They learned to identify herbs, gather roots, distill their essences, and compound simple skin remedies. Clearing the complexion, producing good color, or taking away the effects of smallpox, these cosmetics combined the arts of beautifying with the science of bodily care.4
Early cookbooks, household manuals, and medical treatises