Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women=s Activism in the Beauty Industry (review)

In Beauty Shop Politics Tiffany M. Gill argues concisely and convincingly that the beauty industry facilitated the political activism of Abeauty culturists@ as they gained economic autonomy through hairdressing and product sales within black communities. The book, which covers the entire span of the twentieth century, complements a sizable body of historical literature on the rise of the beauty industry and the unique place of African American women in that industry. Gill explores the paradox and the dilemma that de facto and legalized segregation, North and South, provided an opportunity for the flowering of African American businesses, among which beauty proved major in the millions of dollars it generated and the numbers of women for whom it provided a livelihood. She also demonstrates that, although segregation provided a niche for the African American industry, the successes of the civil rights movement did not close African American beauticians out of the trade. White entrepreneurs successfully entered into the manufacture of African American beauty products, but intra-racial preferences and persistent discrimination kept white beauticians out of black beauty shops and African American patrons loyal to practitioners of their own race.

Gill documents beauticians= participation and leadership in protest and rights advocacy from the Garvey movement through health improvement campaigns at the turn of the twenty-first century. Gill is at her strongest in showing throughout that beauticians engaged in gender politics alongside racial politics as women confronted gender role expectations within the black community as they grappled simultaneously with the challenges of minority life in America. She shows that the beauty shop both catered to women=s hair styling demands and provided a haven from African American women=s battles with the world outside the salon.

She brings to light the significant political contributions of lesser-known beautician activists like Adina Stewart and Mamie Garvin Fields. Organizations of beauticians stressed the importance of political rights and mobilized beauticians to work for civil rights and for individual electoral candidates. The last two chapters of the book, which follow beauticians from the civil rights movement through the challenges of the Hurricane Katrina calamity and of the Obama election campaign, bring the most new information to light.

Sources for the study of the African American beauty trade are vast in number, but they are widely dispersed and often hidden inside collections on other topics. Gill has been adept and thorough in plumbing the sources. Tiffany Gill has made a major contribution to our understanding that the beauty industry has been central to African American women=s search for economic sufficiency and the struggle for all African Americans= political rights. The one area that Gill might have developed more fully is the important role that beauticians played in encouraging and supporting secondary and higher education for minority women, the luxury of which many had been themselves deprived. Nonetheless, if I were to recommend one book to read on the history of the African American beauty industry, this would be the one.