Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South

by Blain Roberts

Overview

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469614212
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/17/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Blain Roberts is associate professor of history at California State University, Fresno.

Table of Contents

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

We've needed Blain Roberts's book for a very long time, and she abundantly delivers the goods—on southern beauty and on women's beauty generally. Looking on both sides of the color line, Roberts sees the moral resonances of beauty, whose work was about power as well as appearance. A great book for oh so many reasons!—Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People and Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol



This book fills an important gap in the scholarship on southern women's history. Meticulously researched, it is well grounded in a wide range of secondary sources and supported with evidence from a variety of primary sources including diaries and memoirs, print culture, corporate records, and even political speeches. Roberts demolished a lot of my erroneous assumptions about southern beauty culture. A fascinating and important work.—Melissa Walker, Converse College

Editorial Reviews

Roberts uncovers the toils and economic effects of feminine beauty in the South during the 1950s and '60s.—Ebony



A Notable African-American Title—Publishers Weekly



The good, the bad and the lovely.—Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal



Roberts has chosen to look at many of the issues of the 20th century through the intimate world of women's beauty regimens and the public world of beauty pageants.—American Press



Roberts's compelling narrative challenges historians to integrate the pursuit of beauty in their examinations of race and politics in the modern South.—The Southern Register



The expression that 'beauty is only skin deep' is put to the test in this well-researched examination of women, race, and standards of attractiveness in the 20th-century US.—Choice



An important book of American social history and a fine addition to the literature on women of the South in the years between the institution of Jim Crow and its demise.—H-Net Reviews



A fresh and valuable contribution to a well-established body of scholarship on the history of modern beauty culture in the United States.—Journal of American History

From the Publisher