Her fixation with Africa was also a strategic demonstration. This approach burnished her reputation as a businesswoman because she intentionally adopted the idea of Booker T. Washington, her business role model and a respected African American leader of her time.45 Washington was interested in “the training of black Americans for service in Africa.”46 In the early twentieth century, Washington sent two groups of Tuskegee graduates to Africa “to teach cotton raising to the natives.”47 Walker later shared Washington’s dream to build an industrial school in Liberia, and her will directed that “certain provisions” be made for the establishment and maintenance of an “industrial and mission school on the continent of ←26 | 27→Africa.”48 With regard to this, some may say that she capitalized on Washington’s fame by following suit; nevertheless, her concerns about their African brothers and sisters and descendants of their common ancestors strengthened her self-proclaimed status as a black woman leader and an heir to the hair culture of her African American foremothers.
Walker had a transatlantic vision of disseminating her Africa-oriented American hair care. In February 1919, she listed “England, France, and Italy” as her destination and indicated “Buy & Sell Toilet Preparations” as the purpose of travel on her passport application.49 Submitted just after World War I, her application to travel overseas was denied by officials, who were on alert against any anti-government activities.50 Although she never accomplished her transatlantic ambition, both the Caribbean and Central America became a part of her realm, and her company shipped products to agents in Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba.51 Subsequently, the reputation of her methods reached Europe through Josephine Baker, a famous African American performer based in Paris, whose coiffure, the Eaton crop, allegedly originated from the Walker System.52
Hair Care Tailored to Black Women’s Minds and Bodies
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, hair became a determining factor for American feminine beauty.53 In 1915, for example, Lillian Gish, a famous silent-movie actress, gave hair-styling tips in an article titled “How to Be Beauaiful![sic]—Thought and Care Bestowed on Hair Adds to Beauty.”54 A 1918 advertisement with a picture of a Russian princess with long, shiny hair, from the New York-based Alfred H. Smith Company, encouraged women to add to their charm and beauty by using their “Smirnoff’s Shampoo Powder.”55 Another advertisement placed in 1918 by the Pompeian Manufacturing Company invited girls to use their cosmetic and hair care products to be more successful in the marriage market, saying, “Both were young[,]; and one was beautiful.”56 These messages, accompanied by ostentatious images, implicitly suggest a connection between hair and beauty.
The African American hair care business, however, harbored a more important goal than finding a good husband. Walker and other hair culturalists sought nothing less than the spiritual liberation of black women from the degrading image of enslaved womanhood. Because of unsanitary housing and poor working conditions, black women had long suffered the stigmatizing misery of hair loss and scalp diseases, which they usually hid by wearing scarves. These scarves were ←27 | 28→also “signs of poverty and subordination,” reminding them of the “mammies” of the slavery days, such as the Aunt Jemima character depicted on the eponymous pancake mix—“an asexual, plump black woman wearing a headscarf.”57 Hair care not only solved hair problems but also dispelled unpleasant associations with the days of slavery.58
During the early days of the beauty industry, Walker and other hair culturalists had to address African American leaders’ prejudices against hair and cosmetic products. For instance, in a letter to the editor of New York Age, Booker T. Washington took “a stand against the hair business” and criticized the newspaper for publishing advertisements containing “false claims” by black cosmetic companies.59 While Washington admitted barbers to the National Negro Business League, he barred hair care product manufacturers from joining the organization in its early days because he believed that hair care products, similar to skin whiteners, would only foster “the imitation of white beauty standards” and injure black people’s pride.60 Walker supported Washington’s perspective that the best solution to racism against African Americans was their economic success, but she disagreed with his and other leaders’ assumption that all cosmetic and hair care products resulted only in decreased racial pride.
Because of common hair troubles, Walker considered black women’s groomed hair to be a physical affirmation of having successfully handled every problem. What Walker was selling and her customers were buying was self-efficacy, defined as “an individual’s confidence in their ability” to complete a task, achieve a goal, or overcome phobias bred out of “past experience, observation, persuasion, and emotion.”61 Confidence differs from respectability, which Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham locates in “the politics of respectability” among progressive black Baptist women and defines as a “reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for [the] reform of the entire structural system of American race relations.”62 Respectability needs accepted norms to refer to and depends on others’ evaluation—approval or disapproval—in a public sphere, whereas self-efficacy is a more spontaneous, self-assertive, and self-sufficient feeling than respectability and is experienced daily in an individual and private sphere through dialog with oneself. African American women were the sole evaluators of themselves, incessantly assessing whether their efforts worked or not. For believers in Walker’s grammar, gaining a daily sense of self-efficacy was more important than any critical gaze or outside attitudes. Similar to Walker, who gained confidence and hope from her daily self-examination, they expected that small changes could be brought about by regular grooming, which would renew their sense of wholeness and uniqueness.63 These accumulated positive feelings, or self-efficacy ←28 | 29→(confidence), which could lead to a higher degree of self-esteem, served as part of the strength they used to overcome the daily difficulties of African American women.
Walker’s hair care system was not an imitation of a white hair care company: it set a different goal from those associated with white beauty standards.64 The aim of her hair care was to provide women with both physical and psychological benefits.65 She stressed health as a source of beauty and success. Walker identified herself as a scalp specialist rather than a hair straightener. Her method emphasized growing hair,