Читать книгу Bodies That Work - Tami Miyatsu - Страница 18

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, hair became a determining factor for American feminine beauty.⁵³ In 1915, for example, Lillian Gish, a famous silent-movie actress, gave hair-styling tips in an article titled “How to Be Beauaiful![sic]—Thought and Care Bestowed on Hair Adds to Beauty.”⁵⁴ A 1918 advertisement with a picture of a Russian princess with long, shiny hair, from the New York-based Alfred H. Smith Company, encouraged women to add to their charm and beauty by using their “Smirnoff’s Shampoo Powder.”⁵⁵ Another advertisement placed in 1918 by the Pompeian Manufacturing Company invited girls to use their cosmetic and hair care products to be more successful in the marriage market, saying, “Both were young[,]; and one was beautiful.”⁵⁶ These messages, accompanied by ostentatious images, implicitly suggest a connection between hair and beauty.

The African American hair care business, however, harbored a more important goal than finding a good husband. Walker and other hair culturalists sought nothing less than the spiritual liberation of black women from the degrading image of enslaved womanhood. Because of unsanitary housing and poor working conditions, black women had long suffered the stigmatizing misery of hair loss and scalp diseases, which they usually hid by wearing scarves. These scarves were ←27 | 28→also “signs of poverty and subordination,” reminding them of the “mammies” of the slavery days, such as the Aunt Jemima character depicted on the eponymous pancake mix—“an asexual, plump black woman wearing a headscarf.”⁵⁷ Hair care not only solved hair problems but also dispelled unpleasant associations with the days of slavery.⁵⁸

During the early days of the beauty industry, Walker and other hair culturalists had to address African American leaders’ prejudices against hair and cosmetic products. For instance, in a letter to the editor of New York Age, Booker T. Washington took “a stand against the hair business” and criticized the newspaper for publishing advertisements containing “false claims” by black cosmetic companies.⁵⁹ While Washington admitted barbers to the National Negro Business League, he barred hair care product manufacturers from joining the organization in its early days because he believed that hair care products, similar to skin whiteners, would only foster “the imitation of white beauty standards” and injure black people’s pride.⁶⁰ Walker supported Washington’s perspective that the best solution to racism against African Americans was their economic success, but she disagreed with his and other leaders’ assumption that all cosmetic and hair care products resulted only in decreased racial pride.

Because of common hair troubles, Walker considered black women’s groomed hair to be a physical affirmation of having successfully handled every problem. What Walker was selling and her customers were buying was self-efficacy, defined as “an individual’s confidence in their ability” to complete a task, achieve a goal, or overcome phobias bred out of “past experience, observation, persuasion, and emotion.”⁶¹ Confidence differs from respectability, which Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham locates in “the politics of respectability” among progressive black Baptist women and defines as a “reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for [the] reform of the entire structural system of American race relations.”⁶² Respectability needs accepted norms to refer to and depends on others’ evaluation—approval or disapproval—in a public sphere, whereas self-efficacy is a more spontaneous, self-assertive, and self-sufficient feeling than respectability and is experienced daily in an individual and private sphere through dialog with oneself. African American women were the sole evaluators of themselves, incessantly assessing whether their efforts worked or not. For believers in Walker’s grammar, gaining a daily sense of self-efficacy was more important than any critical gaze or outside attitudes. Similar to Walker, who gained confidence and hope from her daily self-examination, they expected that small changes could be brought about by regular grooming, which would renew their sense of wholeness and uniqueness.⁶³ These accumulated positive feelings, or self-efficacy ←28 | 29→(confidence), which could lead to a higher degree of self-esteem, served as part of the strength they used to overcome the daily difficulties of African American women.

Walker’s hair care system was not an imitation of a white hair care company: it set a different goal from those associated with white beauty standards.⁶⁴ The aim of her hair care was to provide women with both physical and psychological benefits.⁶⁵ She stressed health as a source of beauty and success. Walker identified herself as a scalp specialist rather than a hair straightener. Her method emphasized growing hair, instead of dyeing and bleaching, which were the mainstay beauty treatments for white women’s at the time.⁶⁶ According to the Madam Walker Beauty Manual, Walker was “the first to visualize the necessity of better scalp care among the women of the race and the first to perfect the preparations and treatments which have brought about these wonderful improvements.”⁶⁷ The system began with scalp care:

This operation [applying the hair grower and massaging the scalp gently], together with the shampooing and pressing of the hair, is widely known as Madam C. J. Walker’s System of Treating the Hair. For results in thickening and lengthening the hair and improving its appearance on both men and women, nothing surpasses this treatment.⁶⁸

Walker stresses the need for scalp care because she thinks that “[p];hysical health is the foundation for many of the qualities that go to build a beautiful being.”⁶⁹ According to the manual, in “The Age of Beauty,” a woman’s beauty, both physical and mental, must be mobilized to “surmount all obstacles and ascend the ladder of success.”⁷⁰ A woman’s beauty defines a “beautiful mind” or “a beautiful character,” comprising “clean, wholesome thoughts; a cheerfully, pleasant, optimistic personality, and a properly directed ambition.”⁷¹ The manual conveys that scalp care is the beginning of the whole process of achieving success, because health is the bedrock of mental and physical beauty, and both factors facilitate success.

For this purpose, Walker invented techniques and hairstyles that suited black hair because white hair care did not work on black hair. In the early twentieth century, white girls were expected to grow their hair long until their eighteenth birthday, and then they “curled, braided, and otherwise sculpted their long locks in ways that made them a fashion accessory”; however, Walker’s agents were instructed to recommend hairstyles that suited black hair.⁷² According to the manual, Mongolian hair is straight and round, Caucasian hair is curly and oval, and “Negro hair” is flat like ribbons.⁷³ Blonde hair appears best when “waved in narrow waves” and given a “curly or fluffy appearance,” but “[d];ark hair is generally ←29 | 30→at its best when it is dressed smooth, glossy, and plain. When dark hair is waved, the waves should be wide waves, generally.”⁷⁴ Walker’s system was based on the intrinsic differences in ethnic hair and sought to achieve “a black version of the proper Victorian-era coif.”⁷⁵ The first African American graduate of the Molar Beauty School, Marjorie Stewart Joyner, soon discovered that the techniques she had learned for styling the hair of Caucasian women were useless when applied to African American hair, leading her to enroll thereafter in the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture in Chicago.⁷⁶ Known as the inventor of the permanent machine, Joyner later became a prominent African American beauty culture educator and the director of Madam C. J. Walker’s nationwide chain of beauty schools.⁷⁷

To Walker, black hair care was not mimicking whites. It was a new adaptation to the changing society, which was dialectically produced through both a rejection of and adherence to the controlling white beauty standards. As Teun A. van Dijk argues in Elite Discourse and Racism, ethnic culture is susceptible to the influence of elite discourse because those who “control or have preferential access to the institutional or organizational means of symbolic reproduction” are almost always the decision-makers and opinion leaders in shaping social discourse.⁷⁸ Likewise, referencing white hair fashions, such as the Gilson Girl, Walker invented black hair culture, which was, to her, a means of demonstrating that African Americans were also a part of modern American culture and active members of changing American society.⁷⁹