About this item
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.
About the Author
Blain Roberts is a professor of history at California State University, Fresno, where she teaches courses in U.S. and women's history. Her first book, Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) , was named a 2014 Publishers Weekly Notable African American title and won the 2014 Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book in southern history written by a woman. She is co-author of Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy with Ethan J. Kytle (The New Press, April 2018) . She has written articles for the Journal of Southern History and Southern Cultures and op-eds for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
