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  • For Appearance's Sake:Beauty, Bodies, Spectacle,and Consumption
  • Karen W. Tice (bio)
Julia Kirk Blackwelder . Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training during Segregation. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003. xii + 183 pp. ISBN 1-58544-244-5 (cl).
Liz Conor . The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. xvi + 334 pp. ISBN 0-253-34391-7 (cl); 0-253-21670-2 (pb).
Margaret A. Lowe . Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 212 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7209-X (cl); 0-8018-8274-5 (pb).
Elwood Watson and Darcy Marti, eds. "There She Is, Miss America": The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America's Most Famous Pageant. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. vii + 205 pp. ISBN 1-4039-6301-0 (cl); 1-4039-6302-9 (pb).

The expansion of visual technologies, commodity consumption, urbanization, and spectacularization in the 1920s ushered in a multitude of new occasions, sites, and ways for women to be on display in the glare of the public eye. Consumerism introduced new desires, discontents, and disapprovals by promoting the idea that women's bodies must be perceived as an investment beholden to a barrage of commodified solutions that promised self-mastery and transformation. As women sought diplomas, tiaras, mobility, respectability, racial uplift, careers, beauty, glamour, and screen credits, their visual presence increased in a variety of cultural spaces in the 1920s. These spaces included college campuses, beauty schools, and city streets. Images of women proliferated before the camera, on the cinema screen, and on pageant runways as the meanings of feminine visibility were reconfigured. While this intensification offered new possibilities for self-fashioning, self-expression, and self-cultivation, it also brought an elaborated system of technologies and logics for disciplining, weighing, and measuring women's bodies and for the promotion of self-surveillance. Women who ignored the dictates of the burgeoning beauty market risked reproach for body neglect. [End Page 147]

Body and appearance are dominant features in determinations of women's place, selfhood, and value. Always subject to symbolic usage and public scrutiny, women's bodies and appearances became increasingly visible in the 1920s. A myriad of cultural tensions and moral panics accompanied the enlargement of women's public presence and mobility in that era. Intricate systems of prescription, observation, and inspection of women's bodies were deployed to assess women's gendered competencies and visual worthiness to appear in and occupy new social locations. The heightened consumerism of the 1920s afforded women new opportunities for display and action, mobilized new understandings of femininity, and became a significant force in shaping women's individual and collective identities and subjectivities.

The books under review address both the enabling and disfiguring effects of the vigorous barter and consumption of women's beauty and bodies. Exploring beauty schools, beauty pageants, commodity culture, and higher education, each of these books probes the nuances of the making and meanings of bodies and identities, gendered prescriptions for care of the self and the body, and the contradictory ways women participated in, resisted, and bargained within the contours of racialized and gendered body politics and economies in the 1920s. They extend a vibrant feminist scholarship that theorizes women's beauty and body work and the shifting and contradictory movements of pleasure, power, difference, subjectivities, and transgression.

Questions about contradictory effects of the training and trading of women's bodies and beauty provide a unifying thread in each of these books since each considers patterns of racialization and gender normativity in the economies of beauty. In Styling Jim Crow, Julia Kirk Blackwelder traces the evolution and politics of African American hairstyling techniques, cosmetic manufacturing, and pyramid sales and marketing techniques to account for the emergence of the privately owned African American beauty schools that were popular from World War I to the early 1960s. The author focuses on the work of Marjorie Steward Joyner, manager of the Walker School of Beauty, and J. H. Jemison, owner of the Franklin School of Beauty. Blackwelder explores the contributions of African American beauty entrepreneurs such as Joyner to the projects of self-help and racial advancement...

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