Etiquette books addressed to African Americans, published later in the nineteenth century, similarly distinguished between cosmetic artifice and the cultivation of real beauty from within. Mary Armstrong, training Hampton Institute students to display signs of middle-class refinement and modesty, considered the use of visible cosmetics disgraceful. “Paint and powder, however skillfully their true names may be concealed under the mask of ‘Liquid Bloom,’ or ‘Lily Enamel,’ can never change their real character, but remain always unclean, false, unwholesome,” she insisted.36
Nothing was more essential to beauty than self-control and sexual purity. “Those who are in the habit of yielding to the sallies of passion, or indeed to violent excitement of any kind,” cautioned Countess de Calabrella, “will find it impossible to retain a good complexion.” Management of emotion nevertheless coexisted with “management of the complexion,” as one guide called it: pinching cheeks or biting lips to create a rosy hue, or wearing colors, especially in bonnet linings, to produce the optical effect of lightening the skin.37 The ideal of pure, natural beauty disguised the way women's appearances were in fact dictated by middle-class cultural requirements.
The new feminine ideal challenged but did not entirely displace earlier perceptions of women as sexually corrupt, deceitful, and vain, vices that face paint had long signified. In his 1616 Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing, Puritan Thomas Tuke had endorsed the use of washes made with barley, lemons, or herbs, the cosmetics of domestic manufacture. But, he warned, “a painted face is a false face, a true falshood [sic], not a true face.” Women who painted usurped the divine order, as poet John Donne put it, taking “the pencill out of God's hand.” Indeed, some viewed the cosmetic arts as a form of witchcraft. The specter of “designing women” led the English Parliament in 1770 to pass an act that annulled marriages of those who ensnared husbands through the use of “scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes and bolstered hips.” That a woman with rouge pot and powder box might practice cosmetic sorcery suggests both an ancient fear of female power and a new secular concern: In a rapidly commercializing and fluid social world, any woman with a bewitching face might secure a husband and make her fortune.38
Nineteenth-century moralists continued to view face paint as “corporeal hypocrisy,” a mask that did not conceal female vice and vanity. They invoked Jezebel, the biblical figure who represented the dangerous power of women to seduce and arouse sexual desire. Painting her eyes with kohl and loving finery, “Oriental” Jezebel was “the originator and patroness of idolatry,” whose arrogance and pride brought death and destruction. Her example taught that women had a duty to spurn adornment, submit to authority, and cultivate piety.39
To most Americans, the painted woman was simply a prostitute who brazenly advertised her immoral profession through rouge and kohl. Newspapers, tracts, and songs associated paint and prostitution so closely as to be a generic figure of speech. In New York, “painted, diseased, drunken women, bargaining themselves away,” could be found in theaters, while in New Orleans, “painted Jezebels exhibited themselves in public carriages” during Mardi Gras. Mining camp balladeers sang:
Hangtown Gals are plump and rosy, Hair in ringlets mighty cosy. Painted cheeks and gassy bonnets; Touch them and they'll sting like hornets.40
The older view of the painted woman informed the efforts of the middle class to distinguish itself from a corrupt upper class. In Godeys Lady's Book, face paint and white washes often appeared as the potent temptations of dissolute high society to be avoided by respectable young ladies. New York journalists at mid-century exposed the “ultra-fashionable” woman as all art and no substance. James McCabe offered a typically harsh assessment in 1872:
She is a compound frequently of false hair, false teeth, padding of various kinds, paint, powder and enamel. Her face is “touched up,” or painted and lined by a professional adorner of women, and she utterly destroys the health of her skin by her foolish use of cosmetics…. So common has the habit of resorting to these things become, that it is hard to say whether the average woman of fashion is a work of nature or a work of art.41
Lurid accounts described the “enamelling studio” as a den of female vice, where fashionable women could “get their complexions ‘made up’ by the ‘quarter’ or ‘year.’” The enameller first “filled up the ugly self-made wrinkles and the natural indentations, with a plastic or yielding paste,” wrote photographer H. J. Rodgers. “Then the white enamel is carefully laid on with a brush and finished with the red.” Fast women, it seemed, would do anything for beauty—paint their veins blue, powder the hands white, remove superfluous hair, expose their eyes to dangerous chemicals. Belladonna gave a “languishing, half-sentimental, half-sensual look,” chemist Arnold Cooley noted, while prussic acid helped “fashionable ladies and actresses, to enhance the clearness and brilliancy of their eyes before appearing in public.”42
Trade card satirizing the fashionable woman, around 1870.
Such descriptions of the “aesthetic side to vice” drew upon well worn images of the painted woman to rein in contemporary women's behavior. Anxiety focused especially on the family, perhaps because the nascent feminist movement, the growth of women's wage work and migration to cities, even the rise of fashion itself all implied that women were loosening familial bonds and duties to pursue individual ends. Uneasy commentators described women who used their wits and beauty to gain advantage in the marriage market, wives more interested in dress than motherhood, and—the conclusive sign of female degradation—women who frequented both the enameller's studio and the abortionist's clinic.43
Occasionally a writer revealed the deeper psychic and cultural dread paint provoked, its power to attract and repulse. Richard Henry Dana came across painted women in the dance halls and saloons of Halifax in 1842. One prostitute in particular caught his eye. She was the “best looking at a distance,” and Dana approached her, seeking to rescue her from sin, yet slipping into the role of virtuous seducer, a situation the prostitute herself sensed and manipulated. Upon closer inspection of the woman, however, he wavered between fascination and loathing: “every sign of health, natural animation & passion had left her, & with a wasted form, hectic & fallen cheek, glassy eyes, & a frisette fastened to her head, she looked like a painted galvinised corpse.” Despite his sympathy toward a fallen woman once “handsome and in better circumstances,” he could not contain his fear of corruption from a woman whose painted face was a mask of death.44
From George Ellington, The Women of New York, 1869.
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison exposed the sexual resonance hidden in the formulaic phrase painted woman. In 1829, before he had achieved fame in the antislavery movement, Garrison was engaged to be married. When a friend wrote him that his fiancée wore visible cosmetics, he replied, “So!—Mary Cunningham ’paints’—does she?” Garrison imaginatively combined the art of seduction with that of a cosmetician:
She shall buy her own brushes, with her own money; but, if she insist upon it, I'll be the