Beyond vanity, p.1
Beyond Vanity, page 1
Beyond Vanity
Beyond Vanity
The History and Power of Hairdressing
Elizabeth L. Block
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.
This publication has been supported by FEKKAI and Bastide Aix-en-Provence and the MIT Press Cooper Memorial Design Fund.
This book was set in Arnhem Pro and Frank New by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Block, Elizabeth L., author.
Title: Beyond vanity : the history and power of hairdressing / Elizabeth L. Block.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023054554 (print) | LCCN 2023054555 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262049054 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262379465 (epub) | ISBN 9780262379472 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Hairdressing—History—19th century. | Hairstyles—Social aspects. | Hair—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC GT2290 .B56 2024 (print) | LCC GT2290 (ebook) | DDC 391.509/034—dc23/eng/20240104
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054554
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054555
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
d_r0
For Judith M. Block, Dr. Michael J. Block, Seth R. Friedman, Abbott Ruthson Block Friedman, Jennifer Block Martin, and Dr. Eric M. Block
Contents
1 Introduction: Beyond Vanity
2 Bedrooms, Barbershops, and Parlors
3 Parties, Stages, and Studios
4 Workplace and Marketplace
5 In Motion and Outdoors
6 The International Marketplace
7 Conclusion: Grounding the Ephemeral
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1
Introduction: Beyond Vanity
The nascent field of hair studies is quickly gaining ground with a corpus of literary, visual, and material work that celebrates and interrogates women’s hair. Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing advances the discourse by establishing how hairdressing and hairstyles claimed deep significance as a cultural site of meaning during one of its most industrious eras—the mid- to late nineteenth century in the United States. The considerable presence of hair becomes demonstrably evident when we study the places and spaces in which women engaged with it. Arguably, the importance of hair has been overlooked in historical studies of the period due to its ephemerality as well as a misplaced association with frivolity and triviality. This correlation may be seen as a misguided holdover in the minds of modern viewers, for whom eighteenth-century voluminous hairstyles (think miniature manicured gardens atop a powdered, towering hairdo) have had a lasting impression over the generally more contained styles of the nineteenth century. Although nonsatirical versions of big eighteenth-century styles often carried incisive, political messages in their time, to current eyes they register as preposterous. Using methods of fashion and visual and material culture studies informed by concepts of cultural geography, Beyond Vanity counteracts an association with triviality by identifying multiple substantive categories of place and space that hair acted within during the ever-modernizing mid- to late nineteenth century. Here are the preparatory places of the bedroom, hair salon, barbershop, and enslaved peoples’ quarters. Also considered are the presentation places of parties, stages, and workplaces, including enslavers’ homes. The aim is to “de-ephemeralize” hair by studying the places and spaces of hair and extracting the consequential ways it contributed to the lived experiences of women.
Although hair in the nineteenth century has been overlooked by historians, it certainly was not neglected by people in their time. Arranging hair was part of women’s daily lived reality, as well as a growing profession and a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. The years focused on here, approximately 1865 to 1900, are especially rich. Within this period, post–Civil War to the turn of the century, the hair industry grew exponentially, claiming substantial space within commercialized society. During these decades, women wore their natural hair, often augmented by hair pieces like frisettes (a curled fringe over the forehead line) or filled paddings like “rats” to achieve a seasonal style. There were not as many bells and whistles as in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, perhaps, but hair claimed a permanence in daily life and business.
A cross-racial scope draws out the question of how race and racism affected who participated in the presentation and industry of hair and which standards they followed. White Eurocentric beauty norms were engrained in U.S. society, and Beyond Vanity investigates how visual materials like advertisements and etiquette manuals perpetuated mainstream ideals, while recentering Black women who capitalized on the opportunity to sell products directed at their communities. The quality, color, racial associations, maintenance, and presentation of hairstyles could determine a person’s entry and status in U.S. culture—outcomes that were anything but frivolous.
The methodology carefully balances the performative media of paintings, photography, and advertisements with introspective journals and letters by women writers. The visual sources are not taken as veritable documents but rather are viewed as conditioned by several intermediaries. For instance, in the case of advertisements, business owners and publishers employed biases and exaggeration when selecting imagery to promote products and perpetuate dominant norms of beauty. Writings by women help to negotiate our understanding by either corroborating or contradicting how visual sources represent the ways hair actually functioned in their lives. Equally important, Beyond Vanity calibrates the limitations of archival sources. Archival work is inherently skewed by what white administrators in power deemed worthy of saving.1 Here, to counter such bias, every opportunity is taken to consult images of and writings by Black women that are invaluable to understanding the narrative of hair, while acknowledging that the currently accessible records lead to a more heavily weighted conception of white hairdressing. This aspect is admittedly problematic in a study that forefronts visual and material culture, as the majority of available images and objects related to hair care depict and were meant for white women. The book works to bring the stakes of the management of Black hair to the foreground as much as possible, benefiting from a fair amount of known documentation for entrepreneurs like Christiana Babcock Carteaux Bannister, though photographs of her or her salons are yet to be uncovered. At times when the archive is silent, some conscientious speculation is necessary, an educated imagining that Black Studies scholar Saidaya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” and that historians like Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Jennifer L. Morgan have generatively modeled in their work.2
Hair Studies
Beyond Vanity builds on the pioneering volume Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (2008), edited by Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang and interdisciplinary in its coverage of literature, performance, art, fashion, film, race, and religious studies. The six-volume series A Cultural History of Hair with Geraldine Biddle-Perry as the general editor and Mary Harlow, Roberta Milliken, Edith Snook, Margaret K. Powell, Joseph Roach, and Sarah Heaton as editors of the volumes that cover antiquity through the twentieth century, further provides essential analysis.3 These books work well in conjunction with Aileen Ribeiro’s discussion of hair in Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art, Susan J. Vincent’s Hair: An Illustrated History, Victoria Sherrow’s Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, and Caroline Cox’s Good Hair Days: A History of British Hairstyling.4 A selection of articles, most notably a themed volume of Eighteenth-Century Studies, contributes to the rather slim corpus of critical approaches to the historical, visual importance of hair before the twentieth century.5 For decade-by-decade chronicles of predominant styles with drawings, Richard Corson’s Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years, first published in 1965, with several successive editions, remains indispensable.6 Neil R. Storey and Fiona Kay’s Victorian Fashions for Women provides descriptions of hairstyles, illustrated by photographs and fashion plates from the 1840s through 1890s.7 Corson’s and Storey and Kay’s books are based in the British context. For early twentieth-century French hairstyling, the field is fortunate to draw on work by historian Steven Zdatny.8 A selection of illustrated book compilations on single topics such as red, blond, curly, or Pre-Raphaelite hair, often in the form of personal musings, must be considered noncritical.
A few scholars of British and French literature have engaged the topic of hair, and scholars of visual, material, and social culture are served well by them. Most notable for the nineteenth century are Galia Ofek and Carol Rifelj, who have persuasively and thoroughly analyzed the role hair plays in novels of the period. Their discussions of its use as a symbol for a character’s virili ty, magical properties, sexual power, and fetish are worth reading.9
Visual culture studies of Black hair in the United States are increasing. Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s book New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair is a welcome addition to the corpus and considers how textured hair of people of African descent and images of textured hair constitute an archive of feeling.10 Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair, an exhibition catalogue edited by Tameka N. Ellington, Joseph L. Underwood, and Sarah Rogers-Lafferty, adeptly explores the complexities of Black hair in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and society in the United States.11 They build on the foundation of Shane White and Graham White’s research on enslaved peoples’ hair practices as well as work by Paul Dash.12
Sociological and anthropological analyses of Black hair prove invaluable to the present study. Most of them focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture with references to earlier periods. Black Hair in a White World, edited by Tameka N. Ellington, comprises an anthology of essays about past and present receptions of Black hair.13 Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair through Personal Narratives, edited by Lyzette Wanzer, presents essays by twenty contributors as forms of narrative therapy for the authors.14 Seminal publications include Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women; Julie A. Willett, Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop; Cheryl Thompson’s writings on the relationship of hair and Black women’s identities; Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry; Tabora A. Johnson and Teiahsha Bankhead, “Hair It Is: Examining the Experiences of Black Women with Natural Hair”; and Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharp, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America.15 Finally, Kobena Mercer has written persuasively about the need for a historical perspective on Black hair.16
Place, Space, and Time
While considering hair studies as closely related to but separate from fashion studies, Beyond Vanity looks to well-established conceptions of fashion in places and spaces by several scholars. Anna-Mari Almila urges that “dress should be understood as spatial practice.”17 John Potvin’s attention to the fleeting aspects of fashion and interior design in counterbalance with the intended permanence of architectural structures is especially motivating here.18 Beyond Vanity resists a strict division between discussions of private and public spaces as overly reductionist. Women moved from home to workplace, from street to home, and within commercial neighborhoods and buildings in a fairly fluid manner, either alone or with a companion. In Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris, Heidi Brevik-Zender effectively puts into practice some of Potvin’s conceptions of how fashion operates in certain places and spaces and how it thus becomes more grounded.19 As a literature scholar, she focuses on the fashion spaces as they appear and are described by French authors like Émile Zola in works such as La Curée (1871). In particular, she examines “in-between” spaces, like the staircases and theater foyers that claimed the interstices of the newly Hausmannized Paris. We share an interest in circulation: fashionable garments and hairstyles alike moved through and acted on social spaces.20
Louise Crewe rightly refers to fashion as “a set of practices that are co-negotiated between people and communities in space” and considers the interrelated element of time.21 With regard to temporalities, hair operates differently from fashion. As Cheang and Biddle-Perry so clearly assert, the symbolic power of hair is distinct from that of clothing because it is a part of the body.22 Or as Kim Smith puts it, hairdressing is a “craft whose work has no permanence.”23 We must therefore contend with its ephemerality. A certain style, like an updo for a ball, might last only a number of hours, but a portrait or photograph can preserve it for decades (fig. 1.1). Similarly, the curling of straight hair or vice versa survives until the next washing, but the instructions on how to attain the desired result might be passed along for years via family and community members. And as Beyond Vanity shows, the cumulative hours allocated to maintenance, preparation, and presentation all happened somewhere—namely, in built and lived-in structures. Whether or not the buildings endure, the documentation of the activities that transpired within them attests to the value invested in hair. It is that value that outlives and counteracts the ephemerality that arguably has led to its devaluing and dismissal. Karen Stevenson’s chapter in Ruth Holliday and John Hassard’s book Contested Bodies considers the hair salon as a “space of consumption,” as does Kim Smith’s chapter in Biddle-Perry and Cheang’s Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion.24 Both inform the present study and position hair on the head as a material that matters, even if the result of its manipulation into a hairstyle is now gone.
Figure 1.1
Carl A. Weidner (U.S., 1865–1906) and Fredrika Weidner (U.S., 1865–1939). Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (Virginia Purdy Barker), 1898. Watercolor on ivory, 8.6 × 6.7 cm. New-York Historical Society. Gift of the Estate of Peter Marié (1905.13). Photography © New-York Historical Society.
Considerations of fashion and hair in place, in space, and through time rely on definitions by cultural geographers. The field of cultural geography is vast, formed by generations of philosophers studying how people relate to their environments and resulting in nuanced definitions of these key concepts. Beyond Vanity takes the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, particularly his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, first published in 1977 and now in its ninth printing, as an essential touchpoint. Tuan’s complex philosophies are best read in full, but distilled definitions of his main formulations prove useful here. In the Tuanian sense, the terms place and time will be used most frequently. Tuan regards space as an abstract, free arena that has not yet been ascribed meaning by people.25 The result of human experiences, performed by individuals and in groups, is that “Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning.”26 We may think here of an uncultivated pasture. Tuan conceives of “places” as “centers of felt value where biological needs, such as those for food, water, rest, and procreation, are satisfied.”27 Now think of settlers choosing the uncultivated pasture, methodically building on it and converting it into a bustling village. The meaning of a place is created by repeated practices, a prolonged commitment over time.28 Consider built structures, like a house that becomes a family home or a hair salon that after repeated visits becomes like a second home or a community center to a customer. We may productively use Tuan’s formulations of time and place as we appreciate the slow work of creating and implementing a shampoo recipe; washing, combing, or styling hair; and cultivating relationships between stylist and client, employer and employee, and family members as they conduct hair practices together. Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s tenet that a place (to use Tuan’s conception; Lefebvre used the term space) is “never empty: it always embodies a meaning” is a key principle here.29 When considering the significance of the practices happening within the places, Tuan refers to places as “centres of felt value,” a concept that guides the study of hair places in Beyond Vanity.30
In tandem with Tuan and Lefebvre, Beyond Vanity uses cultural geographer Nigel Thrift’s theories on space and the ways it supports and inspires “material thinking” and the study of material culture.31 His perceptions are especially helpful when comprehending the varying scales of places, from tiny to enormous and the close relationship of space and time. He also challenges the existence of boundaries.32 Further, Beyond Vanity engages the field of mobilities studies, a close relative of spatial studies, particularly in how it casts light on the “travel of material things within everyday life” and the movement of bodies through space and time.33 Mobility as an analytical paradigm was originally aimed toward use in the social sciences but has proven constructive within humanities contexts. It is especially generative when conceptualizing the meanings of in-between movements like traveling to a destination by steamship or train, riding a bicycle, or working itinerantly, as with door-to-door sales.
