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Beauty Culture

and Women's

Commerce

Cosmetics today seem quintessential products of a consumer culture dominated by large corporations, national advertising, and widely circulated images of ideal beauty. The origins of American beauty culture lie elsewhere, however, in a spider's web of businesses—beauty parlors, druggists, department stores, patent cosmetic companies, perfumers, mail-order houses, and women's magazines that thrived at the turn of the century and formed the nascent infrastructure of the beauty industry. Few of these enterprises used the kinds of systematic marketing and sales campaigns so familiar to contemporary Americans. Nonetheless, the proliferation of products, services, and information about cosmetics and beauty definitively recast nineteenth-century attitudes toward female appearance.

Women played a key role in these developments. Indeed, the beauty industry may be the only business, at least until recent decades, in which American women achieved the highest levels of success, wealth, and authority. Such well-known figures as Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, the remarkable African-American entrepreneurs Madam C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone, and post-World War II businesswomen Estee Lauder and Mary Kay Ash mark an ongoing tradition of female leadership. Although exceptional businesswomen, they are only the most visible signs of a much larger phenomenon. As beauty parlor owners, cosmetics entrepreneurs, and “complexion specialists,” women charted a path to mass consumption outside the emergent system of national advertising and distribution. In so doing, they diminished Americans’ suspicion of cosmetics by promoting beauty care as a set of practices at once physical, individual, social, and commercial. Their businesses transformed the personal cultivation of beauty—the original meaning of the expression “beauty culture”—into a culture of shared meanings and rituals.

Before the Civil War, women dressed their own hair or, if affluent, bade their maids or slaves to do so. Professional hairdressers, often men who visited the homes of the wealthy, were relatively few in number. Commercial beautifying was generally considered a “vulgarizing calling,” a legacy of its ties to personal service and hands-on bodily care. This view changed as women's need for jobs grew more pressing in the late nineteenth century. Industry, immigration, and urban growth had transformed the American economy and society. Working-class women expected to support themselves or contribute to family income, but even middle-class women were thrown back on their own resources when their husbands died or failed in business. The vast majority of female wage earners toiled in factories, on farms, or in private homes as domestic workers, but growing numbers worked in clerical, retail, and service jobs. These included hairdressing, cosmetology, manicure, and cosmetics sales.¹

Although commercial beauty culture mainly offered women lowwage work, it became one of a handful of occupations—along with dressmaking and millinery—to sustain female entrepreneurship and ownership. Ironically, the feminine stereotypes that rendered women unfit for the world of commerce validated their endeavors in the beauty business. Promoters proclaimed that “no profession is more suitable for women, or more pleasant, than that of helping others to become beautiful and youthful in appearance.” Some, like Mary Williams, became salon proprietors. The daughter of slaves who had bought their freedom, Williams learned the hair trade after the Civil War and opened a shop in Columbus, Ohio, in 1872. Serving both white and black residents, Williams eventually ran the “leading hair-dressing establishment in the city,” sold hair goods, and taught the trade to other African-American women.²

Women also became inventors, manufacturers, and distributors of beauty products. The full extent of their business activity remains unknown. Still, the U.S. Patent Office recorded the efforts of many women bent on achieving success selling cosmetics. They patented improved complexion creams, combs to straighten or curl hair, and clever devices to carry powder or dispense rouge. Most often women sought trademark protection for their products. From 1890 to 1924, they registered at least 450 trademarks for beauty preparations, the bulk of them after 1910. These confident inventors and manufacturers probably represent only a fraction of all the women who peddled their own formulas to neighbors or sold them in local salons. Many filed papers with the Patent Office years after they had put their product into use; only when they perceived a market for it, or faced imitators, did they choose to register the trademark.³

Beauty entrepreneurs came from all walks of life. Some of the more affluent had found themselves caught between women's new educational opportunities and ongoing sex discrimination in employment, especially in the sciences. Anna D. Adams aspired to be a surgeon, Marie Mott Gage a chemist. Adams abandoned her career in surgery when faced with the prejudice of male physicians, became a professor of chemistry, and eventually founded a chain of beauty parlors. Gage, who grew up in a family of doctors, studied chemistry at Vassar, but by the 1890s was writing beauty manuals and manufacturing products for the “scientific cultivation of physical beauty.”⁴

A few women from wealthy or middle-class families turned to beauty culture in desperation, when circumstances forced them to support themselves. Harriet Hubbard Ayer, one of the first women to establish a large cosmetics manufacturing operation, was born into a prosperous Chicago family in 1849 and married the son of a wealthy iron dealer at age sixteen. For a time she lived the life of a society matron, but growing marital conflicts and her husband's business failure led Harriet to divorce him in 1886. As sole support of her children, she took a series of jobs, then moved to New York and began manufacturing a face cream named after Madame Recamier, a French beauty of the Napoleonic era. “Not a vulgar white wash” but “intended to replace the so-called blooms and enamels,” Recamier cream proved a success. “Within a month,” a contemporary account observed, “the house was filled from top to bottom with women trying to manufacture toiletries fast enough to meet the public demand.” Ayer traded upon her elite connections to elicit rare endorsements from prominent society women and gain display space in department stores.⁵

Most women entrepreneurs, however, started out in less fortunate circumstances. They were farm daughters and domestic servants, immigrants and African Americans, ordinary, often poor women. They lived all over the country, in cities, small towns, and rural backwaters. From socially marginal origins, they risked little going into a business whose reputation remained dubious. Traces of their local or regional exploits exist only in old fliers, ads, and patent records. But even those who became most successful, who shaped the national development of the modern cosmetics industry, often started out poor and disadvantaged.

Elizabeth Arden in the 1920s.

Helena Rubinstein in the 1920s. (Photograph by Hal Phyfe)

Florence Nightingale Graham was born around 1878, some time after her parents had emigrated from England to become tenant farmers in Canada. Little is known about her early life, except that Florence grew up in poverty and had a limited education. As a young woman, she took one low-paying job after another, in turn a dental assistant, cashier, and stenographer. Following her brother to New York City in 1908, Florence found work in Eleanor Adair's high-priced beauty salon, first as a receptionist and then as a “treatment girl” specializing in facials. To better serve the wealthy patrons, Graham taught herself to speak with proper diction and to project an image of upper-crust Protestant femininity. A year later, she joined cosmetologist Elizabeth Hubbard in opening a Fifth Avenue salon. Their partnership quickly dissolved and Graham bought the shop, decorated it lavishly for an elite clientele, and, improving on Hubbard's formulas, developed her own Venetian line of beauty preparations. When she reopened the salon, she took the name Elizabeth Arden, one she considered romantic and high class.⁶

In contrast, Helena Rubinstein had already achieved considerable success by the time she arrived in the United States. The facts of her early life, like Arden's, have been obscured in a haze of publicity notices. In the 1920s and 1930s, she claimed to have been born into a wealthy family of exporters, taken advanced scientific and medical training at prestigious European universities, and obtained her winning skin cream from the famed actress Modjeska. Her 1965 autobiography and other sources present a somewhat different picture. Born in 1871, Rubinstein came from a middling Jewish family, her father a wholesale food broker in Cracow. Helena's medical education ended after two years when her parents, apparently opposed to her fiancé, sent her to live with relatives in Australia. In the 1890s, she worked as a governess and perhaps as a waitress. The cream used in her family had been made by a Hungarian chemist and relative, Jacob Lykusky, who taught her the simple beauty techniques she ultimately capitalized upon: cold cream to cleanse the face, astringent to close the pores, and vanishing cream to moisturize and protect the skin. Her friends clamored for the cream, and Rubinstein began to sell it. Finally she opened a beauty shop in 1900, using money lent her by a woman she had befriended on the passage to Australia.⁷

Within two years Rubinstein had become a success. She moved to London in 1908, opened a salon in Paris in 1912, and when war erupted in Europe, relocated to New York and opened a salon off Fifth Avenue, not far from Elizabeth Arden. There the two rivals warred for leadership in the high-status beauty trade. Disdainfully referring to each other as “that woman,” they refused to acknowledge how much they had in common—their troubled family life, economic insecurity, string of typical female jobs, their immigrant status, and not least, the acts of self-making they performed to become cosmetics entrepreneurs.

Annie Turnbo and Sarah Breedlove also found in the beauty trade an escape from poverty and marginalization, an outlet for entrepreneurial ambition. Born in 1869 and orphaned as a child, Annie Turnbo lived with her older siblings in Metropolis, Illinois, a small border town on the Ohio River. She received an education, taught Sunday school, and joined the temperance movement, but how she earned a living as a young woman is unknown. As a girl Turnbo learned plant lore by “gathering herbs with an old woman relative of mine…an herb doctor [whose] mixtures fascinated me.” In the 1890s she began experimenting with preparations to help black women like herself care for their hair and scalp. Many of them needed remedies for such common problems as hair loss, breakage, and tetter, a common skin ailment, but women also considered lush, well-groomed hair a sign of beauty. By 1900 Turnbo had produced a hair treatment containing sage and egg rinses, common substances in the folk cosmetic tradition. In that year she and her sister moved to Lovejoy, Illinois, a river town inhabited only by African Americans. They began to manufacture the product Turnbo called Wonderful Hair Grower and canvassed door to door. Facing a skeptical black community, she recalled, “I went around in the buggy and made speeches, demonstrated the shampoo on myself, and talked about cleanliness and hygiene, until they realized I was right.”⁸

Annie Turnbo Malone.

Madam C. J.Walker, circa 1914.

Demand quickly outstripped the two sisters’ ability to produce the hair grower, and Turnbo hired three young women as assistants. Urged by friends to expand the business, in 1902 she moved across the Mississippi to St. Louis, drawn by its vibrant black community, a robust drug and toiletries trade, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, then being planned. Once well established in St. Louis, Turnbo began to extend her market, first throughout the South, then nationally. In 1906, as competitors began to imitate her product, she proudly registered the trade name “Poro,” a Mende (West African) term for a devotional society. When she married Aaron Malone in 1914, Annie Turnbo Malone's Poro was a thriving enterprise.

Sarah Breedlove, or Madam C. J. Walker as she became known, also entered the hair-care business in these years. Her early life bore some similarities to Malone's, her chief rival. Born to former slaves in Delta, Louisiana, in 1867, she was orphaned as a child and moved in with her older sister. In 1882, at age fourteen, she married laborer Moses McWilliams. Over the next few years, she gave birth to her daughter Lelia, then her husband died in an accident. Moving to St. Louis in 1888, Sarah did housework and laundering, raised her daughter, and joined the African Methodist Episcopal church and several charitable societies. She also briefly became a Poro agent.⁹

When her hair began to thin and fall out, Sarah experimented with formulas containing sulphur, capsicum, and other stimulants, and began to sell her own remedy. She too called her product Wonderful Hair Grower, which may have been one of the reasons Malone registered the Poro trade name. Although each woman claimed to have invented haircare systems for African Americans, they probably modified existing formulas and improved heating combs already on the market, adjusting them for the condition and texture of black women's hair. Their technique for pressing hair, using a light oil and wide-tooth steel comb heated on a stove, put much less strain on the scalp than earlier methods using round tongs or “pullers.” By straightening each strand, this “hot comb” process created the desired look of long, styled hair.¹⁰

McWilliams moved to Denver in 1905 and began to sell in earnest. “I made house-to-house canvasses among people of my race,” she recalled, “and after awhile I got going pretty well.” She married newspaperman Charles J. Walker, who helped her start an advertising campaign and mail-order business. Over the next few years, Madam Walker extended her business to the South and Midwest and in 1910 settled the company in Indianapolis, which she considered a favorable spot both for African Americans and for national distribution. Although she incorporated the company in 1911, the major decisions and the profits remained in her own hands.¹¹

In another period, Arden, Rubinstein, Malone, and Walker might have lived and labored in obscurity, a fate shared by most women. At the turn of the century, however, women's need for employment in a growing commercial and service economy joined with new cultural perceptions about appearance making and self-display, to foster women's enterprises in beauty culture. Finding ways to overcome the economic barriers and social impediments women faced, these four shrewdly took the measure of their times—and the market—to build business empires.

Like those who started other consumer-oriented businesses, beauty entrepreneurs grappled with common problems of ensuring distribution, creating brand recognition, and increasing demand. Sex discrimination intensified the host of challenges they faced. Women had less access than men to credit and education in business methods. They were generally barred from professional training in pharmacy, which was necessary to run drugstores and was the path men usually took into toiletries manufacturing. These obstacles had profound consequences for women's businesses. Although information about these early enterprises is limited, most remained small-scale affairs: a one-woman manufacturing operation based in a kitchen or a sideline to salon services, requiring little capital investment.¹²

In some of the larger companies, women controlled promotion and marketing as the firm's public face, but husbands or brothers held key positions in finance and manufacturing, where they oversaw both money and workers. When Elizabeth Arden expanded from salon services to product sales in 1918, she attended largely to her exclusive salons while her husband supervised production and distribution of the cosmetics line. In other cases, men played lesser or adversarial roles. Although Charles Walker initially helped his wife establish her hairgrower business, it was Madam Walker who ambitiously expanded the enterprise into the national market. Women often struggled with husbands or relatives for control of their companies. The marriages of Walker and Malone ended in divorce over business conflicts; Harriet Hubbard Ayer's ex-husband and daughter charged her with mismanagement, committed her to an asylum, and assumed control of the company. The Woman's Cooperative Toilet Company found it necessary to explain to a prospective sales agent in 1891, “We are not men doing business under assumed ladies’ names,” and derided this “mania of our men imitators.”¹³

Gaining access to distribution networks and retail outlets especially plagued women entrepreneurs. Competition for shelf space in department stores favored the more prestigious male perfumers, considered skilled craftsmen. Druggists relied on large wholesale supply companies, which tended to carry established brands and hired men as traveling sales agents. African-American entrepreneurs faced these problems and more. With few black-owned groceries, general stores, and pharmacies, they needed to convince white retailers to stock their products. The success of cosmetics manufacturer Anthony Overton was unusual. Overton remembered calling on the trade for the first time—“several white merchants refused to even look at our samples”—but with enormous persistence he eventually broke through the color line in drug and variety stores. Only after Malone and Walker had created demand through other means were their goods accepted onto drugstore shelves.¹⁴

In response to these difficulties, beauty culturists redefined and even pioneered techniques in distribution, sales, and marketing that would later become commonplace in the business world. Working outside the conventional wholesale-retail system of trade, they parlayed salon- and home-based enterprises into mail-order and door-to-door peddling operations. These were already familiar methods of selling that had, by the late nineteenth century, reached into small towns and rural areas of the country and brought an array of consumer goods into American households. In the cosmetics field, the California Perfume Company (later renamed Avon) became most famous for this sales strategy. Book salesman David Hall McConnell founded the company in 1886 when he discovered that the sample bottles of perfume he gave away were more popular than the books he sold. He turned over daily operations to a Vermont woman, Mrs. P. F. E. Albee, who developed a plan to recruit women to sell perfumes and toiletries in their neighborhoods. By 1903, there were about 10,000 such house-to-house “depot agents” across the country.¹⁵

Many women entrepreneurs successfully imitated California Perfume's sales strategy in the 1890s and early 1900s. In magazines and circulars, they advertised for clerks, sewing women, domestic servants, and women “doing hard, muscular work” who might prefer the ease and refinement of selling cosmetics. When a Miss Prim inquired about a genteel and private occupation, Bertha Benz described her plan “for giving paying employment to ladies everywhere.” She offered Prim a branch office covering her county in North Carolina, from which she could sell the “Famous Tula Water for the Complexion.” The work, she said, consisted “of filling agents’ orders of mailing circulars answering letters of inquiry etc which you can do quietly in your own house without renting an office for this purpose.”¹⁶

House-to-house canvassing and mail order permitted businesswomen with little capital or credit to expand their manufacturing operations. They reduced their risk and gained cash flow by defining sales agents as resellers, requiring them to purchase the goods, rather than take them on consignment or sell on a salary basis. Mail-order cosmetics firms kept relatively little inventory, manufacturing as orders came in. Madam Walker's business from the first “operated on a cash with order basis and very little capital has ever been necessary for its operation,” observed an Internal Revenue Service agent, puzzling over Walker's haphazard bookkeeping. Starting out in 1905, she had managed, in a mere thirteen years, to build a business with thousands of sales agents and annual gross sales of $275,000, a staggering success.¹⁷

Beauty culturists developed “systems” and “methods,” signature skin- and hair-care programs that facilitated, and subtly redefined, these distribution networks. Gone were miscellaneous creams and lotions, replaced by specialized and coordinated products and step-bystep techniques. Skin-care systems required cosmeticians to apply an array of cleansing and “nourishing” creams and to massage the face with wrinkle rollers, muscle beaters, or other devices; customers were encouraged to follow the program at home. Each product performed a single function, but together they became a therapeutic “treatment line” in a regular beauty ritual. Unlike powder or paint applied temporarily to the surface of the skin, such methods promised to assist nature and secure a lifetime of beauty.¹⁸

A promotion for facial vibrators from the Electric Supply Company, 1906.

A “face lift” device from Susanna Cocroft. Detail, “Success Face Lifters” pamphlet.

Systems were frequently taught through beauty schools and correspondence courses, replacing casual apprenticeships with formal training and certification in hairdressing and beauty culture. The first academy of hairdressing appeared in 1890, and over the next two decades beauty schools sprang up across the country, many of them founded by women. Among the earliest was Madame Le Fevre's school of dermatology, which trained fifty-seven women in one year to fulfill “her desire to establish competent women in business in cities and towns where she is not represented.”¹⁹

From the Poro Hair and Beauty Culture Handbook, 1922.

Madam C. J. Walker and others in an open touring car.

A number of entrepreneurs developed franchise operations in conjunction with beauty schools. These enabled certified beauticians to own salons, advertise their services as “system” shops, and capitalize upon the entrepreneur's name and reputation. Innovative beauty culturist Martha Matilda Harper, based in Rochester, New York, began to license her “Harper Method” in 1890 and eventually had more than 300 franchised salons. The Marinello Company, founded by Ruth Maurer, opened its first beauty school in 1904 and became one of the dominant organizations in the business, training white and black women and setting up franchises around the country. The Poro and Walker systems, and later Sara Spencer Washington's Apex, attracted thousands of black hairdressers as well, some of whom made the transition to proprietor. Although unrecognized by business historians, women entrepreneurs were in the vanguard of modern franchising methods that would take off more generally after World War II.²⁰

Other women pioneered in the direct sales methods known today as multilevel marketing or “pyramid” organization. In addition to beauty services and product sales, agent-operators earned money and other rewards by recruiting women into their organization and training them in their specific beauty method. Entrepreneurial black women made this strategy highly successful. Malone and Walker traveled into every region of the country to teach women how to treat hair and sell products—remarkable journeys in this period of intensifying segregation and violence against black Americans. Their recruits trained others in turn, widening the circle of distribution. Sales agents fanned out to areas otherwise isolated from the consumer market. Walker's traveling representatives were instructed to “thoroly canvass Virginia, North and South Carolina,” and the Sea Islands, because “there are more Negroes and more money there than in all other states combined.” Like many direct-sales firms today, Malone rewarded agents not only with cash but with other incentives, bestowing diamond rings, low-cost mortgages, and public accolades for recruiting new agents, for becoming top sellers, and even for demonstrating thrift and charity. Led by compelling, larger-than-life personalities, these companies were early examples of what Nicole Biggart calls “charismatic capitalism,” institutions that combined the profit motive with the qualities of a social or even religious movement.²¹

Women in the beauty business faced a specific cultural dilemma as they promoted the consumption of cosmetics: How were they to champion products that to a large extent still signified female immorality, goods whose use consumers often denied? If beauty was a “duty,” as the prescriptive literature proclaimed, its achievement remained hedged about by women's embarrassment and anxiety about maintaining their good name. When she went into the beauty business in 1888, Mrs. Gervaise Graham observed, “Ladies went veiled to the Beauty Doctor, for fear of being ridiculed for their vanity.” Similarly Harriet Hubbard Ayer recalled “how amused I was to get orders for a simple emollient cream, with the request that it should be sent in a plain wrapper.”²²

Men in the patent cosmetics and drugstore trade used two distinct appeals to induce women to buy beauty preparations. Patent cosmetics advertisements, like those for medicinal elixirs, featured sensational copy, dramatic before-and-after pictures, and promises of magical transformation. By 1900, retail and manufacturing druggists wished to separate themselves from such ballyhoo yet wondered how to handle women consumers—perceived as irrational and impulsive—in the growing market for cosmetics. With typical condescension, Chicago druggist B. S. Cooban described the problem, given cosmetics’ “miscellaneous character” and the exacting requirements of “the ‘dear creatures’ who are our chief patrons”:

Miracles are not only expected but demanded. To meet these demands and keep the girls, both old and young, in line, requires a great variety of stock, and the exercise of considerable judgement and tact in recommending articles for individual needs. And such needs! Did you ever take especial notice of the beauty troubles and tales of woe that women give you? How they will “roast” some powder or lotion!²³

Promoting cosmetic wares as staple goods and toilet necessities, Cooban and other druggists advertised their intrinsic qualities, celebrated low prices, and provided instructions for use. Nonplussed by beauty and by women, they offered the dry, indulgent humor of the man behind the counter, the laconic language of “good enough,” and matterof-fact descriptions of their miscellaneous goods.

Women entrepreneurs hawked cosmetics in a different key. They called themselves beauty experts who identified with women's wants and desires, and often cited their own bodily trials and tribulations as the reason they had become manufacturers. Necessity was indeed the mother of invention. One turn-of-the-century beauty culturist, known as Madame Yale, often said that she had wanted to be a general physician until she had the “personal experience of the worst forms of female disease.” She healed herself, so she claimed, then decided to devote “her life-work to the benefit of her Sister Women” by developing a complete program of physical and beauty culture. Yale reminded clients that, as a “woman precisely like yourself,” she knew “more about and underst[ood] better the secrets of woman's ills than all the male doctors and so-called ‘professors’ in the world.” Some advertisements simply telegraphed women's ownership—as in a wrinkle eradicator by “B & P Co. (Two Women)”—female identification conferring instant legitimacy. Claiming authority through shared experience created a powerful link between producers and consumers, indeed, blurred the line between them.²⁴

Women's anomalous place in the business world dictated this commercial strategy. After all, beauty expertise was deemed a natural form of female knowledge that women were expected to possess. Some businesswomen even hid their active experimentation with formulas and chemicals behind divine revelation. Madam C. J. Walker claimed she “had a dream” in which “a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair” and prophesied that she would beautify and uplift the race. French immigrant Marie Juliette Pinault, who had little else in common with Walker, also named a dream the inspiration for her products.²⁵

These businesswomen shrewdly understood that their own personalities were business assets, integral to their sales strategies. They carefully crafted their self-images, creating distinct versions of femininity that resonated with the particular aspirations and social experiences of those they targeted as consumers. White beauty culturists often shed their names, hometowns, and social backgrounds to create personae as beauty experts. In a business dedicated to illusion and transformation, they were self-made. Madame Yale was, in fact, Maude Mayberg, who lied about receiving a degree from Wellesley College and whose other claims about formal training in chemistry, physical culture, and art are dubious. Poverty had “induced” Ida Lee Secrest “to take up the business,” and, carrying some cosmetics recipes given her by an uncle, she fled Chanute, Kansas, for New York City. There she became “cosmetic artiste” Madame Edith Velaro, literally her own creation, whose “eyebrows were artificial, her lashes dyed, her complexion made up, her eyes brightened and made to look large by one of her preparations.”²⁶

Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein fashioned contrasting public personalities on which to base their cosmetics marketing. Arden, as a 1938 Fortune profile correctly observed, was “an alias concealing many things”—a chain of salons, a manufacturer, a sales corps, and, not least, Florence Nightingale Graham herself as she curried favor with elite society. “Arden pink” was her signature, coloring her apparel, salon interiors, and cosmetics packaging. Promotional letters under her name imitated her whispery, intimate speaking voice to create poetic pictures of youthful loveliness, considered models of “writing in woman's own language” in the advertising industry. Often described as a dithering, smiling figure, Arden undoubtedly exasperated the male executives around her. According to several reports, she was “fond of asking male advice on money and business, and almost invariably disregard[ed] it.” This criticism reflects less upon Arden's “unbusinesslike manner” than on the control she exerted over her image and the company. Pink femininity concealed Arden's acts as an exacting and tough manager who broke a threatened strike, fended off complaints from the Food and Drug Administration, and remained the sole stockholder of her company, despite several marriages and buyout offers.²⁷

Rubinstein also adopted a high-society image but invoked elements of the New Woman. In her view, the beauty specialist was a professional woman, “who is human in her sympathies, and will express these sympathies thru [sic] science.” Typically photographed in a lab coat or striking dress and jewelry, she presented a dramatic figure of modernity—exotic, urbane, and scientific. Reporters often commented that Rubinstein, a Polish Jew, was “not a talker”—her speech was heavily accented—but also stressed her worldliness and sophistication: “a woman without a country who is at home in any country.” Characteristically, she took an inclusive view of beauty culture, welcoming “stenographers, clerks, and even little office girls” into her salon and acknowledging the variety of skin types in a nation of immigrants. Unlike Arden, who only flirted with the suffrage movement when it was fashionable, Rubinstein became a long-term supporter of women's equal rights.²⁸

If white beauty culturists sloughed off their origins to perform the American myth of self-making and individual mobility, black entrepreneurs tended to embed their biographies within the story of African-American women's collective advancement. Madam Walker identified closely with the struggles and dignity of poor women even as she sought entrance into the ranks of the black economic and social elite. She had remade herself in certain ways, hiring a tutor in standard English and carefully fashioning a refined and elegant appearance. Still, she persistently tied her business to the fortunes of the unschooled and poor women whose life experiences she had shared. In 1912, she burst into public awareness when she attempted to address the National Negro Business League at its annual meeting. Booker T. Washington repeatedly refused to recognize her, apparently not wanting to endorse such a disreputable calling. Finally Walker rushed up to the podium, exclaiming “surely you are not going to shut the door in my face,” and launched into an impassioned speech. “I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub…then I was promoted to the cook kitchen,” she said emphatically, “and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.” Walker proved her mettle, and Washington welcomed her back the following year, when as a featured speaker she pointedly declaimed, “I am not ashamed of my past; I am not ashamed of my humble beginning. Don't think because you have to go down in the wash-tub that you are any less a lady!”²⁹

The projection of personality and expertise was central to the sales strategies women entrepreneurs adopted. Many of them advertised their beauty culture systems in local newspapers, distributed trade cards, and sent pamphlets through the mail. Advertising, however, did not dominate their marketing efforts. Beauty culturists placed relatively few advertisements, for example, in the national women's magazines then gaining popularity. Perhaps the cost of ad space was prohibitive. Then, too, some women's magazines banned ads for “quack” beauty cures, and none carried advertising from black-owned companies. At the same time, businesswomen's orientation to localism—apparent in their salons and door-to-door operations—may have disposed them against the type of advertising campaigns mounted by soap companies, packaged goods producers, and other manufacturers. Instead, beauty entrepreneurs concentrated on women's aesthetic and cultural practices, weaving their trade into the fabric of women's everyday lives. Addressing a heterogeneous public split along racial, class, and regional lines, they devised new forms of female interaction to create a sociable commerce in beautifying.