Book description
How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become
indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a
"kitchen physic," as homemade cosmetics were once called,
become a multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take
over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business?
In Hope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss gives us the
first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture, from the
buttermilk and rice powder recommended by Victorian recipe books to
the mass-produced products of our contemporary consumer age. She shows
how women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare
their freedom, identity, and sexual allure as they flocked to enter
public life. And she highlights the leading role of white and black
women-Helena Rubenstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden and
Madame C. J. Walker-in shaping a unique industry that relied less on
advertising than on women's customs of visiting and conversation.
Replete with the voices and experiences of ordinary women, Hope in
a Jar is a richly textured account of the ways women created the
cosmetics industry and cosmetics created the modern woman.
"Incisive, lively. The model of everything social history
should be."-Los Angeles Times
Kathy Peiss is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American
History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Zoot
Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, also available from the
University of Pennsylvania Press.
