Black Women and Beauty Culture in 20th-Century America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Leeds Craig
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
Beauty Contests ◽  
Hair Care ◽  
Black Beauty

Black beauty culture developed in the context of widespread disparagement of black men and women in images produced by whites, and black women’s exclusion from mainstream cultural institutions, such as beauty contests, which defined beauty standards on a national scale. Though mainstream media rarely represented black women as beautiful, black women’s beauty was valued within black communities. Moreover many black women used cosmetics, hair products and styling, and clothing to meet their communities’ standards for feminine appearance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the black press, which included newspapers, general magazines, and women’s magazines, showcased the beauty of black women. As early as the 1890s, black communities organized beauty contests that celebrated black women’s beauty and served as fora for debating definitions of black beauty. Still, generally, but not always, the black press and black women’s beauty pageants favored women with lighter skin tones, and many cosmetics firms that marketed to black women sold skin lighteners. The favoring of light skin was nonetheless debated and contested within black communities, especially during periods of heightened black political activism. In the 1910s and 1920s and later in the 1960s and 1970s, social movements fostered critiques of black aesthetics and beauty practices deemed Eurocentric. One focus of criticism was the widespread black practice of hair straightening—a critique that has produced an enduring association between hairstyles perceived as natural and racial pride. In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, African migration and the transnational dissemination of information via the internet contributed to a creative proliferation of African American hairstyles. While such styles display hair textures associated with African American hair, and are celebrated as natural hairstyles, they generally require the use of hair products and may incorporate synthetic hair extensions. Beauty culture provided an important vehicle for African American entrepreneurship at a time when racial discrimination barred black women from other opportunities and most national cosmetics companies ignored black women. Black women’s beauty-culture business activities included beauticians who provided hair care in home settings and the extremely successful nationwide and international brand of hair- and skin-care products developed in the first two decades of the 20th century by Madam C. J. Walker. Hair-care shops provided important places for sharing information and community organizing. By the end of the 20th century, a few black-owned hair-care and cosmetics companies achieved broad markets and substantial profitability, but most declined or disappeared as they faced increased competition from or were purchased by larger white-owned corporations.

Bathing Beauties and Predatory Lesbians

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-104
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Beauty Contests ◽  
Black Lesbians ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Public Beaches

Chapter 3 explains how the Black Press featured the overt display and sexualization of black women’s bodies in the context of bathing beauty contests and recreation on public beaches and pools. The Black Press worked to transform pernicious notions of heterosexual black women as ugly, mannish, and uncivilized and meet their readers’ imagined desire for respectable and sexual images of African American women. However, chapter 3 also argues that this transformation was dependent on the demonization of black lesbians whom the Black Press cast as dangerous and predatory. Chapter 3 concludes that black bathing beauties’ photographs challenged vicious white stereotypes and aided a new generation of African American women’s attempts to reconstruct their public image even as they rendered the black lesbian as the embodiment of depravity.

A Community Art Center for Harlem: The Cultural Politics of “Negro Art” Initiatives in the Early 20th Century

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 155-183
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Calo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Community Art ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
African American Artists

During the interwar decades, African American artists grew in number and visibility, and a wide range of publications featured stories on so-called Negro art. Notices on Negro art exhibitions and educational initiatives appeared in the black press and the mainstream mass media, as well as in special interest publications ranging from Art News to the Club Candle (the newsletter of the New Rochelle Women's Club). Though small in number, collectively these events served as opportunities to measure the overall progress or pulse of the African American artist.

Make Me Beautiful

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
American Beauty ◽  
A Site ◽  
Beauty Products ◽  
Culture Site

This chapter closely engages African American beauty culture. Advertisements for beauty products such as hair pomades and skin bleaches comprised a significant portion of advertisements in African American newspapers throughout the early twentieth century. The advertisements for beauty products targeting African American women unveil a discourse and an industry that were instrumental to the materialization of a New Negro culture. Through advertisements and open discussions about African American beauty, self-presentation and adornment shifted from an individual/private sphere issue to a formidable public culture site of individual and collective expressivity during the New Negro era. African American beauty culture thrived as a site of reinvention and re-imagining for New Negro women. It also offered multiple authorial roles in which these women could partake, including: producer, consumer, and manufacturer. In Washington, this black women’s beauty culture was a thriving industry as well as a battleground and playground for black women actualizing themselves as New Negro women.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 369-384
Author(s):  
Joseph P. McCormick II ◽  
Todd C. Shaw ◽  
Robert A. Brown
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
Central Actor ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
Inclusive Policy ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
Exclusive Or

In this volume, we have presented a conceptual framework that argues the American constitutional order has entailed various racial orders that advanced either more racially exclusive or more racially inclusive policy agendas. The American presidency has been a central actor in these orders. One key conclusion we reach based on the analyses of our contributors is that the historic presidency of Barack Obama attempted to advance the policy interests of various African American communities across several dimensions—e.g., voting rights, criminal justice reform, healthcare, and housing. And while African American communities may have had what we call an “inverted linked fate” with Obama (or linked their sense of well-being with Obama’s perceived political well-being), Obama’s personal linked fate with African American communities—i.e., Black women, Black LGBTQ persons, faith-based communities, etc.—did not overcome what we call the “inclusionary dilemma.” Despite African American voters being critical to Obama’s electoral victories, the aforementioned orders imposed constraints upon the Obama policy agenda and fueled the president’s reluctance to press more left-of-center policy prescriptions that would be of greater benefit to Black communities. We end by considering the Obama administration’s shortfalls relative to a new, progressive Black politics during the Trump administration.

African American Doctors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McBride
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Medical Schools ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Black Physicians

Throughout history African American doctors have been held in high esteem in the culture and political affairs of Black America. Reflecting the major phases of black American history, the literature on black doctors reveals black medical leaders are seen as an elite because they have promoted simultaneously improving their professional status and the plight of the black race pursuing national equality. The first body of writings covers the slavery era, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the so-called Nadir through the early 20th century. This literature asserts folk medicine practitioners, along with indigenous midwives helped to hold slave and free black communities together. As proprietary medical schools sprouted up throughout the antebellum North, a few blacks managed to gain apprenticeships or attend medical schools and then finally became practicing doctors. Like other trained physicians of this era, black doctors promoted their practices and medicines as entrepreneurs throughout the free black communities. Early black physicians were also abolitionists and enthusiastically supported the health-care efforts of the federal government during the Civil War and Reconstruction. A second body of writings focuses on the black doctor from the start of the 20th century through World War II. They cover leading black physicians who, with the support of white professional and philanthropic allies, struggled to accommodate the segregated or, that is, “Jim Crow” health-care institutions. In the South, segregation laws and customs barred blacks from treatment in mainstream hospitals as well as black physicians from using these hospitals. In health-care facilities Jim Crow practices included separate, less-equipped wards for black patients and few privileges for black doctors and nurses to serve in these facilities. Nonetheless, black medical professionals and civic activists built independent hospitals, medical schools, and public health campaigns. Black physicians, surgeons, and nurse leaders inspired the black community’s collective esteem, public health initiatives, and political elevation. A third stream of publications emerged concerning black medical students and doctors involved in the civil rights movement. These black doctors played major roles locally and nationally to integrate medical schools, hospitals, and health agencies. A fourth body of writings developed in the last two decades of the 20th century and early 21st century. These published works center on the struggle by blacks to overcome personal handicaps and become exemplary professionals. These writings also focus on black doctors and the urban black health crisis, as well as black medical life in a new highly technological medical system The final stream of contemporary books on black doctors involve those who became national figures in the nation’s attempt to reform medical education and policies. These doctors became prominent in the face of persistent racial health disparities as well as other national health problems such as inadequate family health care and mass disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

Male Homosexuality and Gender-Nonconforming Expression

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-159
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Negative Images ◽  
Female Impersonators ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 5 details how Black Press news coverage produced a black public sexual sphere that allowed readers to debate homosexuality and gender-noncomforming expression’s position in early-twentieth-century black communities. As the Black Press worked to transform negative images of blackness, they held homosexual life and gender-nonconformity up as a spectacle that could not seamlessly fit into notions of African American respectability. Nonetheless, regular coverage in the Black Press proved that editors believed that readers enjoyed reading articles and viewing images about female impersonators and gay men. In presenting readers’ responses to this coverage, chapter 5 draws attention to instances of contest and negotiation between diverse African American readers as they struggled to understand the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality.

Black Is Profitable: The Commodification of the Afro, 1960–1975

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 536-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susannah Walker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Bottom Line ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
American Beauty ◽  
Political Symbol

The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro's grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the commodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line.

Pleasure in the News

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press is an examination of the coverage of sexuality in the Black Press between 1925 and 1940, otherwise known as the interwar period in the United States. In the book, Kim Gallon argues that the Black Press made sexuality a major topic of news to appease African American readers’ imagined desires for sexual coverage. In so doing, Gallon argues that Black Press coverage produced a number of black sexual public spheres that offered early-twentieth-century African Americans opportunities to debate and discuss particular sexual topics. In their simplest form, black sexual public spheres were discursive arenas in which readers debated and discussed sexual matters. They also served as mechanisms for readers to critique and sound off on a wide range of issues, including respectability, interracial marriage, divorce, the sexualization of women’s bodies, and homosexuality within early-twentieth-century black communities. Overall, Pleasure in the News provides an expanded understanding of the ways readers interacted with the Black Press and representations of sexuality.

Ratchet-Rasquache Activism: Aesthetic and Discursive Frames within Chicago-Based Women-of-Color Activism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Irene Gonzales
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
High Poverty ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
The Rich

Abstract Extending the rich literature about women-of-color activism, this article analyzes the ways Chicago-based Chicanas and Black women maintain, build, and expand low-income residents’ access to and ownership of the city. I draw on 30 months of community-engaged, ethnographic fieldwork within high-poverty Mexican- and African-American neighborhoods and on interviews with 22 women-of-color activists across Chicago. Combining the cultural signifiers “ratchet” and “rasquache,” I highlight the strategic use of discursive and aesthetic frames to disrupt negative narratives of these women’s activism and their often-vilified communities. As a framework, ratchet-rasquache activism counters urban development practices that marginalize Black and Chicana/o/x communities. Emerging from African-American communities, “ratchet” connotes unruliness and low-class behavior. In Mexican communities, “rasquache” similarly connotes negative or low-class behavior but also means making the most with the tools one has. Both concepts, rooted in working-class sensibilities, can subvert narratives of racial uplift and reject normative whiteness as the standard for both activism and community development. Deploying “ratchet” and “rasquache” as positive attributes, Chicago-based women-of-color activists used nonhierarchical community-organizing tactics to operate as neighborhood strategists. Acknowledging the strength and expertise within marginalized, impoverished communities, they embraced a working-class, asset-based, ratchet and rasquache strategy, while striving to build something from something.

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