Lipstick Traces

The subject of Kathy Peiss’ lively book--the rise of the American cosmetics industry--is modest. Certainly it does not have the epic scope, the gravitas, of more traditional historical subjects, such as the abolitionist movement, the Depression or the world wars. To some, Peiss’ subject may even seem frivolous. Peiss alludes to this potential problem in the book’s preface, when she reports that her elderly aunt--a retired cosmetics saleswoman--wondered how “such throw-away feminine objects [could] be the stuff of serious investigation.”

In fact, “Hope in a Jar” is a model of everything social history should be but rarely is. Drawing on a wide variety of refreshingly unexpected sources, Peiss views the rise of beauty businesses in the late 19th century, and the acceptance of cosmetics among women of all classes in the early 20th century, as intimately entwined with the development of the modern, urban world, and of women’s troubled but potentially liberating entry into that world.

This approach may sound simple, but it is in fact fairly tricky and requires a delicate intellectual balancing act. Peiss eschews the overwrought paeans to popular culture that taint so much postmodern criticism. Simultaneously, she rejects the moralism of feminist critiques such as “The Beauty Myth,” which insist that cosmetics are oppressive, male-defined commodities. And she avoids the nostalgia of “declinist” historians, who yearn for a kinder, pre-industrial era (in which, by the way, the great majority of women spent the great majority of their often abbreviated lives performing exhausting, unpaid domestic labor). Peiss is that rarity, a historian who comes to neither praise the modern world, nor bury it. She is, rather, genuinely interested in discovering how a society, and the people within it, change.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Peiss reports, cosmetics were widely scorned, although “vanishing” creams that would improve the skin’s health were acceptable. Still, purity--in products and in women--was the ideal: “Women who painted usurped the divine order, as poet John Donne put it, taking ‘the pencill out of God’s hand.’ ” For women, beauty was fate--and fate was the operative idea. But as the 19th century progressed, Peiss writes, “a fundamental and far-reaching change was taking place: the heightened importance of image making and performance in everyday life,” accompanied by the possibility for some women to invest “self-portrayal with a degree of choice, play and pleasure.”

What had changed? Well, everything. Cities--where “seeing and being seen” by strangers is a fact of daily life--were burgeoning; women were abandoning farm work for wage labor; a culture of consumption was emerging; social and economic fluidity increased (accompanied, inevitably, by social and economic insecurities). In addition, mirrors, electrical lighting and--most important--photographs flooded into American homes, changing the very essence of the way people viewed each other and themselves. Increasingly, Peiss writes, Americans “saw the face not as a transparent window into inner beauty, but as an image of their own making.”

And increasingly, “paint” was no longer the province of actresses and prostitutes. In the new urban culture, where one’s audience no longer consisted chiefly of the immediate family, women began using makeup to assert “worldliness against insularity, and sexual desire against chastity. Moving into public life, they staked a claim to public attention, demanded that others look. This was . . . a new mode of feminine self-presentation.”

Peiss shows how turn-of-the-century “beauty culture”--a scattered network of beauty parlors and small-scale cosmetics businesses--offered unique economic opportunities for women, especially those on the margins, such as African Americans and immigrants. These female entrepreneurs created products for poor, working-class and black women, thus constructing what Peiss terms “the female democracy of manufactured beauty.”

The 1920s were a crucial, and dismal, turning point. In this period, home-grown beauty companies that stressed social interaction with their customers were superseded by large cosmetics firms, often led by men, that relied on mass-merchandising and expensive national advertising. In this formative period, Peiss writes, the “aesthetic of women’s freedom and modernity . . . narrowed and turned in upon itself.” Images of female eros were “guided . . . safely toward heterosexual romance and marriage,” the “weak bond between female beauty and accomplishment dissolved,” and femininity and consumption became inextricably linked. But “makeup”--the very word implies creativity and invention--had become firmly entrenched in women’s daily lives. And the old dichotomies between loose and virtuous women could never be fully restored: A 1938 piece in Mademoiselle cited two new lipsticks--Lady and Hussy--and matter-of-factly invited readers “to decide which you prefer to be.”

“Hope in a Jar” is most incisive in explicating how debates over cosmetics have reflected more general anxieties about women’s power, sexuality, identity, authenticity and independence. For African Americans, these thorny issues were vested with a special intensity. In the black community, Peiss observes, “commercialized beauty was . . . from the outset, explicitly a problem of politics. Cosmetics were never far removed from the fact of white supremacy, the goal of racial progress, the question of emulation.” For some blacks, uplifting the race meant looking refined, focusing on education and achievement, and spurning the presumed superficiality of what newspaper editor Chandler Owen called “Good Looks Supremacy.” But for others--especially those who emigrated from Southern farms to Northern cities in search of prosperity, possibility and freedom--”looking fine” was an exuberant rejection of servility. “For those who embraced it,” Peiss claims, “the culture of beauty asserted desires for dignity, respect and social participation in a world in which these basic human imperatives were all too often denied.”

Peiss is by no means an unadorned apologist for either cosmetics or the modern world of which they are a part. She makes clear that a commodity culture, with its emphasis on appearance and shifting identities, was (and is) full of pitfalls for women. She knows that consumption does not equal liberation and that the pursuit of beauty remains a duty, and a burden, for many women.

And she is aware of the pathos--and the intelligence--of a letter writer to the Baltimore Sun, who answered that newspaper’s “Should Women Paint?” contest in 1912 with a counter-question: “Why not be satisfied with ourselves just as we are?” Peiss skillfully connects the questions posed by both the Sun and its plaintive reader to larger social and economic forces, and reveals why the answers are personal, political and fascinatingly complex.