Detail, Lyons Manufacturing Co., “The Secret of Health and Beauty?” an advertising pamphlet for Hagan's Magnolia Balm.
In answer, black writers unmasked white hypocrisy through narratives that turned upon deceptive appearances, mistaken identities, and passing. In a short story by Gertrude Dorsey Brown, for instance, wealthy white partygoers laughingly put on blackface for a masquerade ball, secure that it would wash off. But this is no ordinary preparation. Unable to remove the blacking, the revelers become black, forced to endure the indignities of Jim Crow. The internal purity of the white lady, without the sign of white skin, could not protect her from harassment. African Americans lived with these conditions daily, Brown observed. Appearance indexed the moral and social status of an entire population, but, she argued, complexion was not commensurate with character.55
Before the rise of a mass-market cosmetics industry, American women may not have been awash in cosmetics, but they were far from unfamiliar with them. Different approaches to attaining facial beauty—homemade preparations, diet and exercise, and nerve tonics—flourished in these years. Paints and patent cosmetics too had a small following. Even as a market for cosmetic preparations slowly materialized, however, older traditions of therapeutics and beautifying continued to inform American habits. Thus preparations to improve the quality of the complexion, made of safe organic substances by women in the home, caused little concern. Commercial preparations, especially paints, were literally another matter: Made from dangerous chemicals and secret formulas, they acted against the body, nature, ethics, and social order. Masking paint, wicked women, tarnished merchandise, sexual corruption, racial inferiority: The world of rouge pots and powder boxes was a very threatening one indeed. Still, some women purchased and painted. Advertisers and advice writers alike acknowledged as much. “As you ladies will use them,” one “distinguished doctor” testified, “I recommend ‘Gouraud's Cream’ as the least harmful of all the skin preparations.”56 Embedded within the warnings about patent cosmetics was tacit recognition of a desire among women to enhance appearance, to possess cosmetic secrets, even to employ volatile, dangerous products in the pursuit of beauty.
Women Who
Painted
Nineteenth-century women who painted, who made visible what others condemned or concealed, left few traces for posterity. While they commented often upon dress and hair, Victorian women wrote only occasionally about their use of cosmetics in diaries and letters. Still, these fragments offer some insight into what it meant to wear makeup conspicuously at a time when Americans looked askance at the painted face. Even as the moral aesthetic continued to govern beautifying practices, a small but growing number of women backed the use of visible cosmetics. These painted women followed another logic of the self and appearance that presaged our modern usage of cosmetics.
Ellen Ruggles Strong was one such woman. In the mid-nineteenth century, she enjoyed the diversions of New York high society as wife of civic leader George Templeton Strong. When he founded the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, Ellen, like many women of her social class, volunteered to do hospital relief work. She caught the eye of diarist Maria Lydig Daly, who caustically described Ellen's greater commitment to fashion than to nursing: “They say very kindly and charitably that Mrs. George Strong went down with rouge pot, crinoline, and maid to attend to the wounded and came home having washed the faces of seven men.” Attending a reception, she observed Ellen “painted like a wanton…with a huge bouquet sent her by one of her little beaux, without her husband.” Not long after, she again met Ellen Strong at a party, “painted as usual, looking, as Temple Prime said, however, very pretty and very young looking. ‘It is well done,’ said he. ‘I can't see it.’ ” Daly's acid reply: “Put on your glasses and thank Providence you are near-sighted, then.”1
Daly held to the traditional view of cosmetics as mask and deplored this display of female hypocrisy and vanity, especially at a moment that called for selfless duty. The rouge pot betrayed the simple, truthful appearance that all women ought to desire. George Templeton Strong, in contrast, had nothing to say about his wife's cosmetic practices in his diaries, nor would he have recognized the painted wanton sketched by Daly. “What must he think? What can he mean by thus leaving her so much to herself?” Daly had wondered. Although warned by friends that Ellen Ruggles was “fashionable” and “artificial,” George Templeton Strong could see her only as the model of angelic, dependent womanhood—”poor, little Ellen in her ignorance and simplicity,” “a noble little girl.”2
As one of the fashionable elite women condemned by Victorian moralists, Ellen Strong skated the thin line between ill-repute and a measure of autonomy. It was an artful performance. The dutiful wife appeared at hospitals and charity events, gave up waltzing because her husband disapproved, and “turned away her eyes from beholding vanity” when the couple went to Tiffany's. When left to herself, however, Ellen played the fast woman in a world of fashion, seductive young men, parties, and pleasures. Her beauty secrets, unseen by men yet visible to women, undermined the ideal of natural beauty, and with it, a fixed sense of self.3
The strain between female appearance and identity—that women are not what they seem—is, as we have seen, age-old, but this tension deepened substantially in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One manifestation was the anxious response to the feminist movement, the warning that women would “unsex” themselves by making public demands for equality with men. Another surfaced in the uneasiness about urban life, where strangers mingled on the streets. Cautionary tales circulated about prostitutes disguised as shoppers, saleswomen posing as ladies, and light-skinned “octaroons” passing into white society. Advice books gave bachelors hints on how to tell the authentic beauty from the fake. “The Venuses and the viragoes,” complained one writer, “have all been concealed in a maze of crinoline and whalebone, cotton, powder and paint.”4
At the same time, another language of the body began to be spoken. In a society in which appearances were fluid and social rank unstable, the question of how to represent oneself was a pressing one. Strategies of appearance—dressing for effect, striking a pose—became ever more important. As writer N. P. Willis observed, “Some of us know better than others how to put on the best look.”5 For some women, cosmetics use was less a deception, a false face, than a dramatic performance of the self in a culture increasingly oriented to display, spectatorship, and consumption.
The ideal face, defined by pale skin and blushing cheeks, remained remarkably constant for most of the nineteenth century. Fashion generally upheld this ideal. Nevertheless, the antebellum image of natural, transparent beauty briefly gave way to a more theatrical and artificial look among the affluent in the Civil War era. Confederate partisan Emma Holmes complained bitterly about the “rebellious” girls in Charleston's high society, who defied their parents, danced as their brothers died, and painted their faces. Young Sallie Bull and Lilly De-Saussure, she declared, “have taken to rouging & Sallie won't submit even to her grandfather's control.”6 Wealthy New York trendsetters wore large bustles and deep décolletage, wove flowers and birds into their curls, and, when a burlesque troupe called the “British Blondes” became a popular sensation in 1868, bleached their hair to a