A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life

INTRODUCTION: Eliza Potter: Black “Working Woman,” Author, and Social Critic

Introduction Eliza Potter Black “Working Woman,” Author, & Social Critic This edition of A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859) brings new visibility to a black woman’s autobiography that challenges many of our ideas about nineteenth-century African American history and literature. A firsthand account of work, race, and femininity, A Hairdresser’s Experience speaks to the possibilities for “working womanhood” that dressing white women’s hair offered a black working woman in the United States before the Civil War. The author, Eliza Potter, was a freeborn African American woman who migrated west from New York in the 1830s to become one of antebellum Cincinnati’s most popular hairdressers. Even though many in her day devalued black women’s work, Potter based her claims to public authority over her clients and readers in her work: her book offers modern readers the critical voice of a working woman who deftly manages to turn the tables on her white elite female clients—women who by virtue of their race and class were considered her social superiors. The fact that she earned high wages and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation’s earliest “beauticians” to white social-climbing women when the majority of black women worked as laundresses at the bottom of the occupational ladder only enhances the piquancy of Potter’s text. A Hairdresser’s Experience provides insights into theways that black working women—one of the nation’s most marginal populations—were able to shape their identities as entrepreneurs and social critics, long before the twentieth-century advent of the better-known Madame C. J. Walker. Published in Cincinnati, a border city on the Ohio River between “North” and “South,” on the eve of the Civil War, this autobiography illustrates how xii Introduction black women authors addressed white reading publics outside the abolitionist circles with which they were most closely associated at the time, when they were viewed principally as reformers working for the common good as abolitionists, teachers, and temperance activists. It exemplifies one working woman’s engagements with the political contradictions at play in a rapidly industrializing nation that strenuously promoted democratic equality, even as it perpetuated slavery, racism, and economic disparities. This edition also offers many book reviews of A Hairdresser’s Experience, reprinted in appendix B, to help modern readers place this text into a reception context that speaks to its significance, then and now. Eliza Potter’s authorship illustrates perfectly how black authors’ drive for social legitimacy in a racist nation encompassed multiple identities and negotiation with multiple publics, or reading audiences.While many black authors of her time were most concerned with the dynamics of race and U.S. racial domination, Potter based her life story on her successful work history and the mobility this work offered. Because her travels offered insights into the sufferings and “domestic bitterness” of elites—and, in particular , of elitewhitewomen—Potter the authorcarved out a literary space that features a black working woman at the center, rather than at the margins , of the era’s transformations in gender, race, and class structures. This representation of herself as a black working woman observerparticipant speaks to Potter’s aspirations for local status as an arbiter of social relations in modernizing Cincinnati: she claims to be a social critic who can speak to the social anxieties associated with the era’s commercial revolutions when she confronts abolitionism and its politics of racial representation (from an antislavery perspective), and when she exposes the often-overlooked phenomenon of black ownership of slaves in the Deep South. The critical vantage point of a social critic enables Potter to offer her readers unusual analyses of slavery and southern interracial relations that foreground the role of class in the formation of free blacks’ status in the South and the contributions free black workers (about 2 percent of the North’s population) made to the nation’s industrialization. Lastly, as a self-identified “working woman,” Eliza Potter authored a work and travel narrative that celebrated national narratives of economic individualism, westward expansion, and “manifest destiny,” even as it also testified to the erosion of workers’ authority in an increasingly unequal society. Whether derived from her mobility, her skilled occupation, or simply her personal qualities, Eliza Potter offers insights into black authors’ diverse experiences and the ways in which these experiences contradict our expectations of a unitary “black” subject and of racially “representative” texts. [3.149.234.141] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12...