Beauty Culture

By: Tiffany M. Gill

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Beauty Culture

Black is beautiful! This familiar cry of the Black Power movement was revolutionary in its celebration of the culture, style, politics, and physical attributes of peoples of African descent. Symbols of the “black is beautiful” aesthetic, most notably the Afro, not only conjured up ideas about black beauty but also highlighted its contentious relationship with black politics and identity. This tension between beauty standards and black politics and identity, however, did not first emerge in the late twentieth century with the Afro or the Black Power movement. In fact, blacks, particularly black women, have been struggling to navigate the paradoxical political nature of black identity and beauty since their enslavement in the Americas. Despite this strained relationship, black women have actively sought to define beauty in their lives and, in the process, created and sustained one of the most resilient and successful black-controlled enterprises in America—the black beauty culture industry.

Although the black beauty industry is often best remembered for introducing the straightening comb, it also provided many black women with opportunities: an alternative to the low-paying jobs they were relegated to throughout the twentieth century. Furthermore, the industry supplied one of the most important opportunities for black women to enter the political arena, because black beauty culturists (hairdressers, salon owners, and beauty product manufacturers) were some of the most politically active members of the black community throughout the twentieth century. Finally, although less tangibly, the black beauty culture industry, with its many products designed to enhance black women's beauty, allowed black women to adorn themselves, a revolutionary act in the context of an American culture that did not hold their appearance in high regard.

Enslaved Beauty

Black women have a legacy of attention to beautification rituals that predates their enslavement in the Americas. Traditional African beauty practices were often socially, politically, and spiritually significant; hairstyles, in particular, often denoted a person's social status. For example, young girls in traditional Senegalese societies often shaved their heads to signify their availability for courtship and marriage. Yoruba women would often braid their hair in a certain way to express their devotion to a particular deity. In other words, hair and hairstyles in traditional African societies never solely represented personal aesthetic or grooming preferences but were mediated by a larger social context. The public presentation of the body, especially through hair care, was important in traditional African societies and was a cultural survival technique that enslaved Africans brought with them to the New World.

Not surprisingly, when European slavers forced Africans to the New World, they did not respect or esteem Africans' hair or overall physical appearance. In fact, the physical attributes of Africans were used as a justification for their enslavement and were a key element in the development of racial ideology in the New World. Africans' appearance, particularly their dark skin and tightly curled hair, was considered a visible mark of their inferiority and even interpreted as a sign that they were cursed. Black women were especially vilified by this discourse; they were held up as the antithesis of white womanhood and were denied any claims to femininity and beauty.

Despite damaging stereotypes, slave women had their own ideas about beauty and took measures to assert some control over this private and personal aspect of their lives. Enslaved black women attempted to replicate many of the beauty rituals from their African heritage. However, without the same tools of adornment they had in Africa, slaves began to use whatever they could find in their new environment. Although the extreme demands of a slave society left little time for pampering, self-adornment was an important part of the way slave women formed their identities. On everyday occasions, when slaves were working, women usually wore bandanas on their heads to protect themselves from the sun. On Sundays and special occasions within the slave community, such as weddings and camp meetings, special hair techniques such as wrapping and threading were displayed instead of the everyday bandana. Whites would often marvel that slaves would spend a good amount of time on Sunday, their only day free from forced labor, on grooming rituals. Slave women, especially, proved to be very resourceful when it came to hair care, using such items as metal-toothed cards designed to comb the hair of sheep as well as household items such as axle grease to comb and condition their own hair.

Catering to the Beauty Needs of Others

During the colonial and antebellum eras, some enslaved and free blacks were able to make a living as hair-care workers. Pierre Toussaint, a twenty-one-year-old slave brought by his owner to New York from Santo Domingo, became a successful hairdresser in the late eighteenth century. After obtaining his own freedom, he used the money he earned serving New York City's elite white families to purchase his sister's freedom and to contribute to the Catholic Church. Other black men, primarily from the French West Indies, coiffed the heads of wealthy white men and women into the early part of the nineteenth century. Even though changes in styles and racial dynamics decreased the number of black men dressing the hair of white women, black men maintained a niche in the hair-care industry as barbers. Many free black men found a lucrative career owning and operating elite barbershops for a white male clientele. Many of these barbers used their wealth to buy family members out of slavery; others used their resources to help build some of the early institutions in the black community.

In the three decades preceding the Civil War, as black men were pushed away from the hairdressing profession and into the male barbering business, black women began to enter the hairdressing profession in larger numbers. Whereas slave women had been responsible for caring for white people's personal needs (including hair care) from the beginning of the institution of slavery, the antebellum period saw the emergence of the successful free black female hairdresser. These women, like their black barbering counterparts, exclusively served a wealthy white clientele. Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser's Experience in the High Life, describes her life as a black beautician in service of a white clientele in Cincinnati and New Orleans, where she also trained slave women as hairdressers. In addition, other free black women, such as the Remond sisters of Boston (Cecelia Remond Babcock, and Maritcha and Caroline Remond)—who established not only a successful hairdressing business but also a wig factory and mail-order enterprise—also made lucrative livings in hairdressing.

Manufacturing and Advertising a Modern Identity

The onset of freedom brought about changes in every area of black women's lives. Beauty culture and beautification rituals played no small role in the way black women expressed their freedom. Once the Civil War began, some freedwomen began indulging in their former mistresses's toiletries, to adorn their own bodies as an assertion of their femininity and their freedom. These seemingly harmless activities brought about repeated reprimands and even whippings by some former owners. Freedwomen were constantly reminded that they were not “real” women and could not indulge in demonstrations of femininity. However, with the end of legal enslavement, adornment and the ability to care for one's appearance became central to the way black women defined and enjoyed their new identities.

Although many blacks were still impoverished and living in the rural South, the latter years of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a small black middle class, as well as the early stages of black migration from rural to urban areas. The nascent cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry that was also developing in the later years of the nineteenth century began to court blacks as a consumer base. In this period, many white-owned companies were joined by a few black-owned ones in advertising to blacks rudimentary beauty products that played upon common racial stereotypes. Advertisements for commercial beauty products used language suggesting that blacks were innately ugly and that their physical attributes were the reason for their low position in the political, social, and economic order. The dark skin and tightly curled hair of blacks, particularly black women, were discussed as though they were a disease that could be remedied only by preparations that helped black women achieve white beauty standards. Advertisements for products with descriptive names such as “Cure-I-Cure: A Cure for Curls” and “Black Skin Remover and Hair Straightener” often used the “before and after” method of advertising, with the “before” sketches depicting a black woman with grotesquely exaggerated features. The “after” sketches would show a black woman not only cured of kinky hair and dark skin (the declared intent of products) but also curiously cured of her wide lips and broad nose. Happiness, prosperity, and a secure future were among the intangibles promised by these products. Other advertising campaigns by white-owned companies used a fictionalized black woman to serve as the spokesperson for their magical products. Although hyperbolic language, as a way to sell products, was not exclusive to white beauty product manufacturers, the centering of this rhetoric on racist language and on the concept of black women's inherent ugliness meant that black women would need to design their own industry if they wanted even a modicum of respect.

It is not shocking that the same culture that gave rise to violent lynch mobs in the late nineteenth century simultaneously produced advertisements that exploited blacks in an attempt to earn money. The puzzling aspect of these early attempts to court the black consumer market is that the black press published these negative depictions in its periodicals. In the early twentieth century, harmful and misleading products that promised to cure blacks of their ugliness filled the pages of black newspapers. For example, T. Thomas Fortune, the owner of the New York Age and founder of the National Afro-American League, accepted such advertisements from white-owned companies. He even received a rebuke from the New York Times for the assumed contradictions between his militant politics and the beauty products he advertised in his publication. Similarly, Booker T. Washington and the editorial staff of the Colored American Magazine initially accepted advertisements from white-owned beauty culture companies but later reluctantly stopped running them. Some members of the black press never accepted the ads; others accepted them without apology. In either case, we get a glimpse of the tensions that were to persist in the black beauty industry even after black women themselves assumed control of the trade.

Rise of Commercial Beauty Culture

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many factors, both internal and external to the black community, converged to make the creation of a black beauty industry possible. For blacks, the turn of the century was arguably the genesis of their modern identities. Consumerism played no small role in this paradigm shift. The migration of blacks in the rural South, first to urban areas in the South and eventually to northern cities; the intense racial segregation of these cities; and the genesis of a black middle class were among the changes that blacks experienced at that time. These factors came together to bring about the emergence of a sizable black business community.

The first three decades of the twentieth century are remembered as the “golden age of black business.” The “golden age,” marked by the creation of the National Negro Business League by Booker T. Washington in 1900, was an era when the creation and sustaining of black-owned and -patronized business and entrepreneurial enterprises were seen as a means of solving the race's problems. The increase in the number of black-owned businesses coupled with the decline of whites as customers and clients of these businesses fostered the growth and development of a distinctly black business community in the early twentieth century.

Initially, the National Negro Business League and other groups that convened to discuss the relationship between blacks and entrepreneurship emphasized the need for black men to get involved in business pursuits, asserting that manhood rights and economic rights were dependent on one another. One man who rose to prominence in the beauty culture industry was the pioneer Anthony Overton. Born the son of slaves, Overton had many occupations throughout his lifetime—among them Pullman porter, lawyer, and proprietor of a general store. Dissatisfied with his limited opportunities in those professions, he decided to try his luck in the burgeoning pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry. In 1898, before black businessmen had even organized the National Negro Business League, Overton established the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company, which manufactured beauty preparations, including the popular “High-Brown Face Powder” for black women. Overton employed only blacks and eventually became the first black manufacturer to sell products in Woolworth stores. He used his earnings from the Hygienic Company to become the primary underwriter for Half-Century Magazine from 1916 to 1922. The magazine became a proponent of the black female club movement and had well-known and well-read women's columns.

Although Overton and many of the white-owned beauty companies managed to make a profit in the early years of the twentieth century, black women would eventually become more successful in manufacturing and selling beauty products by tapping into the longings and desires of black women to use these products to develop their modern social, economic, and political identities. The politics of adornment were especially important to black women, who throughout their history had been vilified as having grotesque and unredeemable physical qualities. Becoming beautiful, something that was seen as beyond their grasp, became a way for black women to assert their dignity, and even make some money.

Female Beauty Pioneers

Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker were pioneers in the development of a black female-controlled beauty culture industry. Both women were daughters of the Reconstruction era. Walker was born to freed slaves on a small plot of land in Delta, Louisiana, on 23 December 1867; Malone was born on a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, on 9 August 1869. Both were orphaned at a young age and raised by older siblings. However, while Walker experienced extreme poverty and physical abuse, Malone's life seems to have been less harsh. Unlike Walker, who appears to have had little formal schooling, Malone completed grade school and attended high school until health problems forced her to abandon her studies. In 1900 Malone got her formal start in the beauty culture industry in the all-black town of Lovejoy, Illinois, where she began to manufacture a preparation to promote hair growth.

“Madam C. J. Walker Preparations.”  This advertisement for Walker's beauty products—including cold cream, vanishing cream, vegetable shampoo, and a hair grower—appeared in New York Age on 17 January 1920.

Library of Congress

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Ironically, Walker started her successful career in the black beauty culture industry working for Malone as a sales agent in St. Louis in 1903, although this was not something that Walker enjoyed admitting publicly. By September 1906, the fierce competition that would mark Malone and Walker's relationship had developed with Malone publicly accusing Walker of stealing her hair preparations. By that time both women's companies were manufacturing and selling hair products designed exclusively for black women. Walker's and Malone's companies would also eventually sell face creams, powders, and cosmetic preparations, but the staple of their “systems,” as they were called—indeed, the crux of the black beauty industry—was hair-care products. Malone's top-selling product in her company's early years was the “Wonderful Hair Grower,” and Walker's was similarly called “Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower.”

Although the rudimentary products contained in Malone and Walker's lines did not, as the products' names suggested, have any special properties that would straighten or grow black women's hair, more than likely the regimen of regular shampooing and the application of petroleum- and sulfur-based products helped prevent further hair breakage. Despite their products' claims of stimulating hair growth, both Malone and Walker were vehement in insisting that they were not promoting the straightening of black women's hair and refused to use that word in any of their advertisements. Instead, they emphasized their concern with the care and cultivation of black women's hair. Nevertheless, the two women eventually marketed devices that helped black women change the texture of their hair. Malone preferred using a device called a “puller,” a claw-tooth contraption that was heated and then pulled through the hair; the Walker system used a heated steel comb—referred to commonly as a “hot comb.” At this stage heated curling devices were not yet available, so a curl was usually made by wrapping hair around pieces of paper or other simple contraptions and then securing it at the ends.

Because the claims Walker and Malone made about growing hair linked them to white-owned companies that promised to “de-kink” hair and lighten skin, their products, and their small but growing sales force, endured ridicule and condemnation from some sectors of the black community. As early as 1904, even before Malone and Walker had made an impact in the hair-care industry, Nannie Helen Burroughs, a leader in the Women's Auxiliary of the National Black Baptist Convention, told women that the true way to improve their lives was not through cosmetics and hair treatments but through moral purity, education, and cultural refinement. Another clubwomen, Cornelia Bowen, explained in a report to the National Association of Colored Women that “it is foolish to try [to] make hair straight, when God saw fit to make it kinky.” Blacks from every walk of life, from race leaders like Booker T. Washington to poor black women in the rural South, decried the industry's effects both publicly and privately. Citing everything from the damage to the racial consciousness of blacks in general to the particular harm in black women's paying too much attention to enhancing their outer beauty, many African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century denounced the burgeoning black beauty culture industry.

Black female beauty entrepreneurs like Malone and Walker responded to these critiques by connecting the aims of their industry with politics, economic advancement, and respectability, to benefit their race—particularly its women. Malone and Walker were actively involved in politics, both through donations to black political causes and the organization of their sales agents and operators into groups that were concerned with, among other things, strengthening the political voice of black women. For example, in 1917 Madam Walker organized her agents into the Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America. One year later these agents collectively drafted a letter to President Woodrow Wilson protesting the lynching of black men and petitioning the president to take action concerning the race riots that occurred in East St. Louis. Furthermore, beauty entrepreneurs also created formidable beauty colleges that became key institutions within the black community. Malone's Poro College, erected in 1917, was considered the “social hub of the Saint Louis black community,” with many religious, cultural, civic, and social organizations using its facilities. The National Negro Business League had its headquarters there in the late 1920s, and after a major tornado in St. Louis in 1927 the facility was used by the American Red Cross as a relief site.

The beauty industry's reputation was further bolstered by the opportunities it extended to black women. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, it provided a lucrative alternative for black women, who were relegated to low-paying and arduous labor, primarily as domestic servants and agricultural laborers. These women, anxious to desert the drudgery and low status of domestic and agricultural work, were eager to join the ranks of beauty operators. From 1890 to 1920 the number of black women engaged in beauty culture increased more than twentyfold. Beauty colleges kept costs low, and the time needed to earn a beauty culture degree was short enough to allow women with limited time and money to become beauty culturists. In addition, because most black beauty culture products were not sold in stores, manufacturing companies also employed black women as door-to-door agents to peddle their hair and skin preparations. Even though most women working in beauty culture did not achieve the wealth of Walker or Malone, they were nevertheless able to enjoy a level of success and financial stability that was not available to black women in many other professions.

The opportunities offered by the beauty culture industry were not confined to America's shores but spread throughout the African diaspora. Walker and Malone also advertised and sold their products throughout South America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Women from these areas often would train at a beauty school in the United States and then open up a salon and a product distribution center in their native countries. The black beauty industry became one of the most pervasive enterprises for black women throughout the black diaspora.

“A Depression-Proof Business”

Although Walker died in 1919, the industry that she helped to create continued to thrive in subsequent decades. By the Great Depression, beauty culture was so pervasive in black women's lives that, for the most part, the industry was insulated from many of the factors that caused the decline of other black business enterprises during the economic downturn of the 1930s. Studies by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Urban League describe a decline in the number of beauty shops during this period (attributable to the diminishing purchasing power of black female workers), and yet the 1930s ironically proved to be a successful time for many in the industry. Sarah Spencer Washington of Atlantic City, New Jersey, began manufacturing cosmetic and hair-care products in 1920. By the 1930s her Apex Beauty System was flourishing, with eleven beauty schools in the United States and abroad and a widely distributed newspaper, the Apex News. Similarly, technological innovation in black beauty culture boomed in the 1930s, with the introduction of various permanent-waving machines which created styles that remained popular for decades.

Furthermore, despite the depressed economy, beauty culture was not a luxury that black women were inclined to forgo. They were willing to barter food and other items to have their hair styled and to purchase beauty products on a regular basis. Even when black women could not pay for their hair-care services, they would still visit the salon to socialize with other black women. A trip to the beauty salon by the 1930s was as much a part of black women's leisure culture as an excursion to the nickelodeon theater or the department store. And because the salon was an exclusively black and female space, they did not have to confront the humiliations of Jim Crow and racism, as they did in other venues.

Defining a Well-Groomed Woman

By the 1940s and 1950s there was increased attention to hairstyling. Despite criticisms leveled against the beauty industry in previous decades, it was not until the 1940s that hair straightening was popularized in beauty culture advertisements. Technological advancements saw the advent of chemical hair straighteners that allowed black women to mimic the styles considered fashionable by white women. This era also saw an increase in the public presentation of black women in music, film, and theater. For example, women like the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and the film star Dorothy Dandridge were arguably as well known for their fashionable coifs as for their talents. By the 1950s well-groomed and well-styled hair was synonymous with straightened hair for black women. Although a small group of black female intellectuals and artists, including Pearl Primus and Miriam Mekeba, wore their hair in a “natural,” or nonchemically or non-heat treated state, black women in general did not leave their homes without first straightening their hair chemically or through heat treatment. Straightened hair was a sign of proper grooming and was the accepted standard for respectable black femininity.

Enter the Beauty Activist

Paradoxically, while hair straightening as a beauty standard for black women was perhaps at its most pervasive moment, the practitioners of beauty culture were never more radical and revolutionary in their use of beauty salons as sites for political activity. The black beauty shop in the 1960s functioned as one of the most important institutions within the black community. By the time of the modern black civil rights movement, beauticians had gained an exalted position within their communities based on their economic autonomy. All aspects of the black beauty industry were still primarily under the control of black female entrepreneurs, even though by this time both the Walker Manufacturing Company and Annie Malone's Poro Company had suffered tremendous losses and had been replaced by a plethora of competing companies and beauty colleges. Still, because black women were the primary producers and consumers of black beauty products, black beauticians were not afraid to take risks in civil rights activities; they did not fear white retribution against their industry. For example, the black beautician Bernice Robinson of the Highlander Folk School's Citizenship Education program aggressively encouraged her clients to get involved in civil rights campaigns by conducting citizen education classes in her salon and driving clients to the courthouse in between their hair treatments. Black schoolteachers, nurses, and domestics would even have mail that they did not want their employers to know about sent to Robinson's Charleston, South Carolina, salon. Building on the legacy of political involvement advocated by the pioneer beauty entrepreneurs, black beauticians in the civil rights era used their strategic position within the black community to agitate for political and social changes, even while they simultaneously engaged in what appeared on the surface to be the frivolous, antipolitical action of hair straightening.

A Black Power Aesthetic

Although black beauty shops during the civil rights era were often sites where black women organized for resistance, the latter years of the 1960s marked a rejection of the straightening practices that often went on in these salons. For the young women who came of age at that time, straightened hair contradicted their political identities and sense of racial pride. Generational conflicts between women who wore Afros and those who equated unstraightened hair with poor grooming and unruly and uncivilized behavior were common. Echoing the shifts in the larger black political scene of the late 1960s, which saw a rejection of many of the integrationist, nonviolent direct action protest tactics of mainstream civil rights groups, organizations dominated by college-age blacks moved toward a more nationalistic political agenda that demanded not only that black pride be expressed through activism but also that it be embodied in one's personal style and appearance. However, what began as a political statement was soon co-opted by those who wished to capitalize on its popularity. Black beauticians, who initially feared the natural hair trend because it cut into their profits, soon began marketing Afro styling techniques that they insisted could be performed only in a salon. The proper-looking Afro, they contended, required as much professional grooming as the previously standard “press and curl.”

The 1970s also marked a significant shift in the black beauty culture industry as white companies began to play a significant role to a degree not seen since the late nineteenth century. Companies such as Revlon, Clairol, and Avon aggressively marketed their products in popular black publications, employed black models in their print and television ad campaigns, and introduced product lines exclusively for black women. Although the Afro and other natural hairstyles did not signal the end of the black beauty shop experience, as many had predicted, the increasing role of white companies in the arena of black beauty culture, along with larger shifts in the black consumer market, brought about a lessening of black women's control of the black beauty industry.

Post-Soul Beauty

In 1985 a high-ranking Revlon executive predicted that the lucrative black hair-care market would be dominated by white-owned companies by the dawn of the twenty-first century. Whether the prediction was indeed prophetic is debatable; it is, however, undeniable that the black beauty industry is no longer a black female-dominated trade. The profitable nature of the black beauty industry, especially the hair-care segment, has caught the attention of many who wish to expand their profits. Successful beauty companies like Aveda and Paul Mitchell market race-neutral products, and historically black-owned companies like Soft Sheen Products have been purchased by international conglomerates such as L'Oréal. Distribution and manufacturing are not the only aspects of the industry that have witnessed the lessening of control by black female entrepreneurs. Whites and other ethnic groups have begun to offer salon services that were previously under the sole purview of black American women.

Ideas about what constitutes “beautiful” for black women have also become more expansive. Although women who choose to wear their hair unstraightened or braided have encountered discrimination in the workplace, there seems to be a growing acceptance of natural hairstyles. Natural hair-care and braiding salons designed to treat black women's hair without chemicals are now commonplace in urban areas. Simultaneously, there has also been a proliferation of styles that use hair extensions and weaves to lengthen hair, arguably an indication of black women's wanting to look more like white women. It is unlikely that there will ever be a consensus on the meaning of beauty in black women's lives, yet the estimated $4 billion spent annually on beauty products demonstrates one fact without question: black beauty culture is big business.

See also Burroughs, Nannie Helen; Civil Rights Movement; Dandridge, Dorothy; Hair; Jackson, Mahalia; Malone, Annie Turnbo; Primus, Pearl; and Walker, Madam C. J. (Sarah Breedlove).

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