The Power of Beauty: Commercial Beauty Culture, the Body, and Women's Political Activism

The four books under review convincingly demonstrate how much the scholarship on beauty culture has moved beyond the narrative of sociopolitical subjugation. The authors explore how women's writings, the women's press, and cosmetics and advertising industries targeted women as consumers and took pleasure in applying cosmetics, how women could use their bodies as tools of self-expression amid changing definitions of femininity in modernity, and how beauty culture stimulated social, economic, and political activism. Although all of the books focus on some aspect of beauty culture, each author asks different historiographical questions about women's bodies, the beauty industry, and political, economic, and social change: How did beauty emerge as a goal to pursue, rather than function exclusively as a tool of women's oppression? How did beauty become an expression of woman's individual personality? How was the pursuit of beauty related to racial division? How did beauty practices challenge social boundaries? Taken together, the books remind us that beauty culture is not only a tool of women's oppression—although there are oppressive elements. These authors instead help us understand that beauty was an expression of woman's individual personality, that beauty and bodily transformation were culturally produced, and that race was a crucial defining marker of beauty and status.

In The Force of Beauty, Holly Grout examines how beauty culture in the French Third Republic (1870–1940) "posed overlapping contradictions for French women, contradictions that enabled women to simultaneously reinforce and challenge established gender norms" (3). The book is divided into three parts: "Respectable Beauty," "Exceptional Beauty," and "Modern Beauty." The first part demonstrates how the emergence of a new commercial beauty culture in the late nineteenth century gendered beauty as essential to middle-class respectability by drawing on sanitary self-care promoted by healthcare professionals. At the same time, women were encouraged to embrace their sexuality. The Grand Coquette—a beauty ideal—emerged as another representation of feminine beauty in fin-de-siècle France. The Grand Coquette—associated with actresses, models, and socialites—made a spectacle of feminine beauty and was a component of an emerging celebrity culture. The female figure provided a glamorous model of womanhood that required a considerable amount of work to achieve and was one that middle-class women wanted to emulate. Grout examines the contradiction between a beauty culture that simultaneously promoted female pleasure and desire, while also keeping women locked within the bounds of middle-class conventions (59). "Beauty Countesses," who authored instructional manuals, transformed women's pursuit of beauty from an extravagant self-indulgence into a necessary and respectable part of bourgeois women's work in the home.

In the second part, entitled "Exceptional Beauty," Grout traces this contradiction in women's beauty culture into the twentieth century using the writing of the celebrated French author and beauty entrepreneur Sidonie-Gabrielle Collete. She examinees two of Collete's most complex fictional characters: Léa, a courtesan, and Renée, an actress. Both characters confront the reality of their aging bodies, but with different effects. For Léa, beauty and youth were important tools in her domination of men, and as her body aged so did her influence. Ren...