Performing Beauty: Allegories of Social Passing in Eliza Potter's a Hairdresser's Experience in High Life
Arizona Quarterly, The › Vol. 65 Nbr. 1, April 2009
Linked as:
Summary
[...] she explains that "society is made up of varieties; but it is easy for the humblest servant to distinguish the well-born and highly-bred lady, under the plainest garb, from the parvenu woman, whose sudden good luck and well-filled purse dresses her in lace, seats her in a carriage, and places her in circles where she is more endured than courted" (13). Because so many women at Saratoga - a popular nineteenth-century New York resort for the leisure class - envy and attempt to mimic one another, she "hate[s] to get hold of any one on their first appearance at the springs, unless they were ladies of great refinement, and used to a great deal of gayety, as, if not, their whole trouble was to look better than Miss So-and-So" (90).
See the full content of this document
Extract
Performing Beauty: Allegories of Social Passing in Eliza Potter's a Hairdresser's Experience in High Life
BY ICIO, TWENTIETH-CENTURY BLACK beauty culturista Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam OJ. Walker had gained national prominence for their social activism and for inventing haircare products to repair the scalp and damaged hair; their products sold remarkably well, in large part, because of advertisements featured regularly in prominent black journals such as The Crisis, and also because their salons and similar enterprises were "saturat[ing]" Harlem's corners (Bundles 281). Malone 's and Walker's success, however, was not unprecedented. Their nineteenth-century predecessor, Eliza Potter, had established a discourse linking beauty and fashion to virtue and morality in 1859 in her autobiography A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life.1 In this text, and throughout her career, Potter sets the stage for her twentieth-century sisters' entrepreneurial success in the black beauty industry; however, her life story has not received the scholarly attention it deserves.2 Although Potter did not exclusively service a black clientele, and although she did not manufacture black hair-care products, she was a successful itinerant, in-demand hairdresser who witnessed both the high life of Northern resorts and the realities of Southern slavery in her work for upper-class white women and aspiring fashionables.
Like Malone and Walker, Potter linked her beauty work with social activism and she trained other black women beauty workers. Moreover, she shared these women's concern that the beauty system was fraught with contradictions for black women. On the one hand, the beauty industry was the pathway to entrepreneurial success for black businesswomen; on the other, it sought to strip black women of their race pride as evidenced by advertisements encouraging them to alter their physical appearance by using skin whiteners, perpetuating white beauty standards.3 Walker and Malone protested the sale of skin whiteners and urged their clients to embrace their blackness; as Kathy Peiss explains, they believed that "improved appearance would reveal to all the inner worth of black women" (89-90). Similarly, Potter's narrative establishes a racially conscious black beauty worker invested in representing black women's inner worth through a well-groome...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
