A discussion and explanation: The paragraphs below are a part of a larger introduction into the history of beauty culture and hair salons. I wanted to introduce the importance of hair among African-American women
early in the paper to set up why beauticians were important and connected to the community which would eventually transition into analysis of the space and later involvement with the Civil Rights Movement.
Ethnic Niches and the Beginning of an Empire
In the highly racialized reality of the Jim Crow South, the styling hair went beyond the act of beautification. The pressing of the hot comb, the application of hair softeners, and the rolling of a curling iron went beyond a simple aesthetic choice for African American women. Negative images of black womanhood were seen throughout advertisements and popular culture during the Jim Crow era. The images feed off a series of oppositional binaries that placed white and black femininity as the antithesis to each other. If white womanhood could be defined as innocent and refined, black womanhood could be defined as the opposite: savage and salacious.[1] Grooming became the tool for African American women to negotiate their identity as African Americans and as women in a racist and sexist society.[2] Hair grooming was a means of identity politics that functioned as a tool to subvert the negative stereotypes and language around Black womanhood. In a highly charged environment of the early twentieth century, Black hair became entangled in a web of social and political meanings of race, beauty, and power. [3] African American hair salons developed to address these complicated meanings of Black hair and the lack of viable options in hair care.
The absence of African American hair care and the need to address the significance of hair after Emancipation initiated the start of the Black beauty industry. A hair tradition emerged among the enslaved Africans to cope with the inability to access proper hair styling products and tools while working in the fields. This body of knowledge of conditioning and fashioning the hair passed from generation to generation of African American women. After Emancipation, African American women could exercise their newly gained agency, moving Black hair care from the household and forming it into a full-fledged business.[4] Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker built empires out of their knowledge of African American hair care and providing a solution to a central problem among African American women at the turn of the century. These women pioneered the Black beauty industry, carving out their fortune and setting the precedent for the business of Black hair care. They experimented with the folk knowledge surrounding African American hair using ingredients from their kitchens to create beauty products.
Annie Turnbo Malone launched the Black beauty industry with a revolutionary product that straightened the hair without damaging the hair follicles. Eventually, she created the Poro School of Beauty and opened some of the African American first hair salons in the United States.[5] The true success of her businesses relied on the use of everyday women to sell their products and suppling the demands of a largely ignored group of consumers. Selling agents, women that went door to door selling beauty products for a company and giving home demonstrations, established the accessibility and credibility of the industry in its early years. The agents acted as physical representations of the effectiveness of the product and provided representation in a beauty industry that had largely focused on White American women. Additionally, the home-based nature of the early Black beauty industry and the success of Madam C.J. Walker solidified beauty culture as a viable career for African American women. Sarah Breedlove received a start in the beauty industry through her employment as an agent of Annie Malone. Breedlove experimented and established a line of hair products in 1905 that brought her national success, and which transformed the former laundress into Madam C. J. Walker.[6] The Walker success story, popularized through Black media and Walker herself, showcased a career that allowed for upward economic mobility. One did not need much education to become a selling agent and the career provided employment outside of the jobs traditional held by African American women in the Jim Crow South. The urbanization and development of beauty schools aided in the development of beauty salons.[7]
Annie Malone set the model for these institutions by establishing her own Poro School of Beauty. Her schools provided instruction about scalp hygiene and the application of her beauty products. The Walker and Apex schools were also established throughout the United States, enticing primarily working-class African American women to join the burgeoning field. Beauty training schools and the structure they provided were essential in the creation of the Black beauty salons.[8] As the industry grew, hairstyling became more complicated with the increased use of heating combs and hair straighteners.[9] The rapid growth of the industry ultimately caught the attention of the federal government resulting in the establishment of formal standards aimed at regulating salons in the 1930s.[10] The measures solidified a separation from the home and established salons as its own separate space for African American women.
Visions of beauty and femininity which were once characterized by white womanhood became attainable to African American women through hair salons and the services they offered. The process of beautification gave women the power to define themselves socially and economically in ways that were not present before the dawn of beauty culture. While it can be argued that the methods and goals of Black beauty culture were influenced by dominant beauty standards which gave rise to the hair straighteners and skin lightening products offered by the beauty industry, one cannot ignore the sense of agency and opportunity that the salon gave African American women. Hair salons were revolutionary as a space owned and largely operated by Black women, and as a space where they could negotiate the meaning of hair care and beauty within the dominant discourse of beauty in the early twentieth century.[11] Beauticians helped mediate the meanings surrounding hair and the physical black body through their craft. A skill that brought them prestige and respect within the African American community. [12] More importantly, their relationship with the Black community and their economic success brought them into the battle for civil rights in the United States.
[1] Patrician Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Power of Empowerment, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 77-79
[2] Tiffany Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 106
[3] Julia K. Blackwelder, Styling Jim Crow (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003), 6
[4] Robert L. Boyd, “The Great Migration To The North And The Rise Of Ethnic Niches For African American Women In Beauty Culture And Hairdressing, 1910—1920”, Sociological Focus 29, no. 1(1996): 14
[5] Elizabeth Engel, “Annie Turnbo Malone, 1869-1957”, State Historical Society of Missouri, https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/historicmissourians/name/m/malone/
[6] Blackwelder, Styling Jim Crow, 15-16
[7] Blackwelder, Styling Jim Crow; Boyd, “The Great Migration To The North And The Rise Of Ethnic Niches For African American Women In Beauty Culture And Hairdressing, 1910—1920”
[8] Tiffany Gill, “Civic Beauty: Beauty Culturists and the Politics of African American Female Entrepreneurship, 1900—1965.” Enterprise & Society 5, no. 4 (2004): 584
[9] Boyd, “The Great Migration To The North And The Rise Of Ethnic Niches For African American Women In Beauty Culture And Hairdressing, 1910—1920”, 19
[10] Blackwelder, Styling Jim Crow 7-8
[11] Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 106
[12] Anna Barnes, “The Black Beauty Parlor Complex in a Southern City.” Phylon (1960-) 36, no. 2 (1975): 149-152
