Publisher Description

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals - cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests - in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

Author Biography

Blain Roberts is assistant professor of history at California State University, Fresno, USA.

Review

Well researched and will be of interest to those concerned with gender, race, southern history, and beauty practices.--Register of The Kentucky Historical Society The good, the bad and the lovely.--Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal The expression that 'beauty is only skin deep' is put to the test in this well-researched examination of women, race, and standards of attractiveness in the 20th-century US.--Choice Roberts's compelling narrative challenges historians to integrate the pursuit of beauty in their examinations of race and politics in the modern South.--The Southern Register Roberts uncovers the toils and economic effects of feminine beauty in the South during the 1950s and '60s.--Ebony Roberts has chosen to look at many of the issues of the 20th century through the intimate world of women's beauty regimens and the public world of beauty pageants.--American Press Illuminates how Southern culture has imagined a constitutive relationship between race and beauty.--Journal of American Culture An important book of American social history and a fine addition to the literature on women of the South in the years between the institution of Jim Crow and its demise.--H-Net Reviews A Notable African-American Title--Publishers Weekly A most significant addition to the scholarship on southern beauty culture.--Arkansas Historical Quarterly A fresh and valuable contribution to a well-established body of scholarship on the history of modern beauty culture in the United States.--Journal of American History [A] fascinating book [that] explores the products, rituals, institutions and beliefs surrounding female beauty to elucidate the economic and cultural transformations of the Jim Crow and Civil Rights South.--Louisiana History Roberts undertakes an extensive and meticulous historical analysis of the construction of female beauty in the South, tying her analysis to the way consumer culture informed Southern beauty via products, rituals, and pageants--all of which together reiterated and reinforced women's embodiment of the impact of the cultural and economic modernization of the most highly racialized and segregated regions of the United States.--Women's Studies Quarterly An excellent and much needed addition to American social and southern history and the history of black and white American women.--North Carolina Historical Review

Review Quote

Well researched and will be of interest to those concerned with gender, race, southern history, and beauty practices.-- Register of The Kentucky Historical Society

Details