Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (review)

For anyone who assumes that the defining, making, and selling of beauty in the United States is a simple tale of the exploitation of women by a male-run cosmetics industry, Hope in a Jar is necessary reading. Acknowledging the partial truth in this view, Kathy Peiss tells a more complicated story that is in most ways a model social and cultural history.

In Peiss’ words, although “cosmetics today seem quintessential products of a consumer culture, dominated by large corporations, national advertising, and widely circulated images of ideal beauty,” its origins are found instead in “a spider’s web of businesses” and developments in which “women played a key role” (62). In delineating that role, Peiss is among those who are reclaiming the notions of both historical agency and the dialectic between the more and less powerful that goes into creating “culture.” In the process, she draws upon an impressive array of primary sources, including illustrations, that reveal something of women’s intentions and responses. She demonstrates significant changes in those intentions and responses from the last century to this one.

The book centers on the 1890s to the 1930s and shows not only the rise of a huge mass-marketed industry in that period—the major change under consideration—but also the smaller transformations that acted as both cause and effect of the larger change. In the early-nineteenth century, clearer lines were drawn between the more acceptable cosmetics, which improved the complexion, and the “paint” associated with the artifice and immorality of the stage and brothel. Beauty was defined as an inner quality that would be reflected in the outer appearance, but a dilemma emerged, says Peiss, in the increasing emphasis upon the “moral duty to be attractive” as middle class women negotiated their place in public space (57). This duty helped transform “paint” into slightly more acceptable “makeup” by the century’s end and created a corresponding view that using it expressed the self rather than hiding it.

Still predating the large national (and mostly male-owned) industry, an era of women entrepreneurs, white and African American, intervened at the turn of this century and transformed the more personal networks and practices of beauty culture into a thriving business. In her discussion of this period, Peiss focuses on the ways women, out of necessity, drew upon traditions and personality to work outside the national advertising and distribution structure. She deftly interweaves the biographies of Elizabeth Arden (née Florence Nightingale Graham) and Helena Rubinstein and African Americans Madam C. J. Walker (née Sarah Breedlove) and Annie Turnbo Malone, all innovators, with the larger story of cultural and economic change.

The 1920s brought mass marketing and mass-produced images of beauty via movies and national magazines. By the 1930s makeup was more a necessity than luxury, and the makeover was a new term in the language. All the while, however, contradictions plagued Euroamerican and African American enterprises, with the latter more self-consciously political both in the pursuit of economic independence and cultural pride and in doing so within the confines of white racist definitions of beauty.

Indeed, Peiss is at her best in her portrayal of multiple voices and experiences (including class, race, ethnicity, and age), her attempt to assess women’s actual practices and motivations, and her attention to complexity and irony. Admitting the limited nature of her sources for consumers’ motives—white middle and working class women—she nonetheless asserts that advertising played much less a role than did (1) the more traditional personal influences of friends and family in their makeup consumption and (2) the ideas that making up was a creative and pleasurable expression of the self and/or just plain necessary to succeed in the job market. Both she and her subjects, however, are aware of the paradox in claiming autonomy while literally buying into an increasingly mass-marketed and monolithic standard of beauty. What is problematic...