Performing Beauty: Allegories of Social Passing in Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life

By 1910, Twentieth-Century Black beauty culturists Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker had gained national prominence for their social activism and for inventing hair-care 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 business-women; 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-groomed, fashionable exterior.

A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life illuminates Eliza Potter’s conflicted role as a beauty worker and social arbiter in an upper-class society that privileges outward appearances rather than internal virtues. The narrative depicts this conflict in its repeated references to Potter’s discomfort about upper-class white women’s reliance on beauty aids to facilitate their entry into forbidden social circles. Indeed, Potter’s text demonstrates that the beauty system is an allegory of social passing; many of her clients use rouge, wigs, false teeth, fake and borrowed jewelry, and other artifices to refashion their physical appearance. Potter underscores her deep ambivalence about the elite white women’s bodies she grooms through the conspicuous absence of specifics about beauty rituals, the products she uses, and hairstyles, which reflects her uneasiness about her role in a beauty culture that transforms clients’ outward appearances without refashioning their internal identities.⁴ As literary scholar Xiomara Santamarina notes, “while there are occasional descriptions resembling society columns of what Miss L. or Mrs. B. wore at such and such a ball, Potter does not appear invested in hairdressing’s contribution to the emerging cult of beauty” (116). Instead, she is concerned with the discrepancy between one’s interior and exterior; dressing fashionably and looking beautiful are good things, so long as they are concordant with an interior goodness. In the narrative, Potter delineates her clients’ attempts to shield their shallow inner selves by passing even as she tries to make her inner self visible by fashioning a well-dressed exterior that is consonant with a noble interior. Ultimately, she describes her clients’ lack of interiority while simultaneously trying to reveal her own.

The desire for social status often supersedes moral duty in the culture in which Potter lives and works, and during a discussion with her clients, she documents a key transformation in women’s behavior during her career: “‘Affairs in our...