This operation [applying the hair grower and massaging the scalp gently], together with the shampooing and pressing of the hair, is widely known as Madam C. J. Walker’s System of Treating the Hair. For results in thickening and lengthening the hair and improving its appearance on both men and women, nothing surpasses this treatment.68
Walker stresses the need for scalp care because she thinks that “[p];hysical health is the foundation for many of the qualities that go to build a beautiful being.”69 According to the manual, in “The Age of Beauty,” a woman’s beauty, both physical and mental, must be mobilized to “surmount all obstacles and ascend the ladder of success.”70 A woman’s beauty defines a “beautiful mind” or “a beautiful character,” comprising “clean, wholesome thoughts; a cheerfully, pleasant, optimistic personality, and a properly directed ambition.”71 The manual conveys that scalp care is the beginning of the whole process of achieving success, because health is the bedrock of mental and physical beauty, and both factors facilitate success.
For this purpose, Walker invented techniques and hairstyles that suited black hair because white hair care did not work on black hair. In the early twentieth century, white girls were expected to grow their hair long until their eighteenth birthday, and then they “curled, braided, and otherwise sculpted their long locks in ways that made them a fashion accessory”; however, Walker’s agents were instructed to recommend hairstyles that suited black hair.72 According to the manual, Mongolian hair is straight and round, Caucasian hair is curly and oval, and “Negro hair” is flat like ribbons.73 Blonde hair appears best when “waved in narrow waves” and given a “curly or fluffy appearance,” but “[d];ark hair is generally ←29 | 30→at its best when it is dressed smooth, glossy, and plain. When dark hair is waved, the waves should be wide waves, generally.”74 Walker’s system was based on the intrinsic differences in ethnic hair and sought to achieve “a black version of the proper Victorian-era coif.”75 The first African American graduate of the Molar Beauty School, Marjorie Stewart Joyner, soon discovered that the techniques she had learned for styling the hair of Caucasian women were useless when applied to African American hair, leading her to enroll thereafter in the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture in Chicago.76 Known as the inventor of the permanent machine, Joyner later became a prominent African American beauty culture educator and the director of Madam C. J. Walker’s nationwide chain of beauty schools.77
To Walker, black hair care was not mimicking whites. It was a new adaptation to the changing society, which was dialectically produced through both a rejection of and adherence to the controlling white beauty standards. As Teun A. van Dijk argues in Elite Discourse and Racism, ethnic culture is susceptible to the influence of elite discourse because those who “control or have preferential access to the institutional or organizational means of symbolic reproduction” are almost always the decision-makers and opinion leaders in shaping social discourse.78 Likewise, referencing white hair fashions, such as the Gilson Girl, Walker invented black hair culture, which was, to her, a means of demonstrating that African Americans were also a part of modern American culture and active members of changing American society.79
Advertisements Promising Beauty and Prosperity
Advertising was an excellent tool for spreading Walker’s personal and corporate goals. In the early twentieth century, advertising was a relatively new development in the field of indirect marketing. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin notes that in the early days, advertising was like “buying a lottery ticket,” because there was no reliable information about the circulation figures of magazines and newspapers.80 However, as publishers began to provide “full and accurate facts about the circulation and character of their publications” by the early 1910s, advertising became “a commodity in the open market.”81 As soon as Walker went into business, she was fascinated by the power of advertising. According to the Kansas City Sun, an influential African American newspaper in the Midwest, she spent more money on “printer’s ink” than on bread and butter in the early days of her business.82 A surviving advertising manuscript (ca. 1912), elaborately designed with words, ←30 | 31→icons, and pictures, exemplifies her firm convictions that advertising would provide credibility to her methods and products.83
Her manual similarly attaches great importance to advertising and says that it is “the world’s greatest boon to business”; thus, the company employed “experts” and spent “thousands of dollars yearly” on advertising to help agents.84 The manual then exhorts the company’s agents to place small advertisements in local newspapers: “Why? Because a large Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company advertisement is likely appearing in the same paper at the same time and the reader immediately connect[s]; you with this great organization.”85 Such shrewd marketing helps to explain why Walker became “America’s Best Known Hair Culturist” and “the most wonderful, clever, aggressive and far-seeing personage” after only 11 years in business.86
African American entrepreneurs also began to notice the power of advertising because of the increased rate of black literacy and number of black periodicals. The literacy rate of nonwhites aged 14 years and over in the United States had increased significantly—from 47.2% in 1890 to 77% in 1920—resulting in a commensurate rise in the number of periodicals aimed at these potential readers.87 In “A Study of Negro Periodicals in the United States,” produced in 1928, Ellis Oneal Knox claims that there were then 511 religious and secular black periodicals, and then, in addition, hair preparation advertisements were among the most frequent kinds of advertisements to appear in such newspapers and magazines.88 According to Knox, African American periodicals not only mirrored the “characteristics of the race” but were also the “most powerful agent of Negro society” in that they expressed the “typical and idealistic characteristics” that shaped African Americans’ social attitudes.89 Notably, I found no quantitative data on local black newspapers’ female readership. Nevertheless, the language and images employed in Walker’s advertisements were directed at female readers.90
With a greater focus on science at the turn of the twentieth century, “scientific” advertising made beauty something that was attainable through practical expertise, instead of an abstract ideal.91 Walker and others in the female beauty business relied on scientific or pseudoscientific terminology to promote their products. An advertisement placed