Abstract

Abstract:

This article explores Southern black women's engagement with beauty culture, fashion, and style politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Mamie Garvin Fields's personal history, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, the article interrogates the ways that middle-class and aspiring black women designed, deployed, and enjoyed fashionable clothes and stylish creations. It argues that in addition to serving as part of a larger project of black middle-class self-fashioning, these efforts were powerful assertions of black women's humanity, individuality, and determination to thrive as black women in the context of Jim Crow.

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