Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry Reviews

• 
  Alok Vaid-Menon

  Whenever people dismiss beauty as frivolous I recommend this book. Gill traces the history of Black women beauty entrepreneurs, "beauticians" who were among the most politically active in civil rights organizing because they were among "the most economically autonomous members of the black community in the twentieth century." Unlike many of their community members during Jim Crowe segregation, they had access to physical space and created community centers out of salons and beauty schools for Black women to acclimate to urban life and build solidarity. Gill highlights the business strategies of women like Madam C.J. Walker like placing beauty courses at historically Black colleges and generating support from Black beauty publications with transnational readership in Africa and across the diaspora. This is a powerful read for anyone interested in politicized aesthetics.
  
• 
  Madeline

  Gill offers a well-researched, thorough, and cohesively-presented look at the intersection of beauty culture and political organization in black communities over the last 100 or so years. It's a slightly more ~academic~ book than, for example, Hope in a Jar (which is a special blend of complex + friendly to a general audience), and it adds a lot of nuance to the received view(s) about black Americans' relationship to money, power, and beauty culture. Being a philosopher, I of course, wanted more abstraction around the edges - but really Gill's giving a highly sourced account of a specific slice of history and an elegant explanation of its significance, and I was, after all, reading it for its empirical bona fides since abstraction is my job much more than an historian's.
  
  "You mean you wanted her to do your work for you?"
  
  No!
  
  "Maybe part of your work?"
  
  Well, sure, who wants to write? Writing is terrible. (But not that hard.)
• 
  Elizabeth Higginbotham

  Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill is an amazing book. While beginning with the fight for women to be taken seriously in the as businessmen in the later 19th century Gill takes us through the many stages of the beauty industry. We know Madam C. J. Walker, but learn about Annie Malone, who introduced Walker to hair care products and models how to get the product into customer’s hands. They operated schools, taught women hair care and how to run a business. Given that the White market was not interested hair care for Black women, the suppliers were Black business.
  
  Walker hired many people for the whole production system. As she became rich, she was an advocate for Black organizations and spaces, including colleges. She pushed them to add beauty culture to the curriculum. In an era when Black women’s employment options were limited to working for others, working for themselves was a way to avoid domestic work in White people’s homes. Other options, like laundress were taxing on women, as Walker knew form experience. Even training as teachers and nurses, meant working for White control school boards and in the case of nursing, the work women could do in the South they could not do in the North, where they could often only find positions as private duty nurses, but not in hospitals.
  
  Walker, Malone and other pioneers had to challenge Black businessmen, but they were able not only make money, but enabled many other back women to do so, either in salon or working out of their homes. The occupation turned out to be Depression proof, as women could either do hair or teach others to do hair. Because their suppliers were Black, their occupation as also Jim Crow proof. There was the politics of hair, since straightening hair seems to be following the dominant culture, but hair care was important to members of the Black community.
  
  The hair care and beauty industries were highly segregated. There were a few Black owned salons that also had White clients. Yet, these tensions. Owners found more acceptance in Europe as well as Africa and the Caribbean where they shared their knowledge and skills. In these spaces, women launched successful businesses. The press covered trips to Europe, that were State Department could challenge stories of segregation in the South. Yet, change would come.
  
  These beauty salons became important spaces in the Black community. There were few spaces to gather, so salons and barber shops played a role in the Black community. They are places to relax and also organize for civil rights, support political candidates and later health care. Churches also play a key role as spaces for civil rights, but health care that had to do with they body, was a harder topic to address. This was clear during the era of HIV-AIDS, but also key illness for Black women, like breast cancer.
  
  The industry begins to shift in the 1970s, as White companies see Black consumers as a market. They buy up businesses, but there are still Black owned hair care producers. They often offer shows that attract wider audiences. These companies respond in emergency situations, like Katrina. Not only getting hair care products to victims but trying to help salons and businesses come back. This legacy is important. We do not have the professional organizations of the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s. Now beauty culture is more likely to be taught in community colleges and vocational schools. Not sure if people who pursue these careers have the level of success as women of an earlier era. Yet, these remain sites to spread information about public needs and political candidates.
• 
  Gina

  The concept sounded interesting, but when the only place I could locate a copy was through a college library, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, it read like a boring college textbook. I suffered through 60% of it and just could not go on.
• 
  Shinynickel

  Off this review:
  Dr. Tiffany Gill earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2003. Her recently published €œBeauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (University of Illinois, 2010) explores African American beauticians and beauty salons and their role in twentieth-century social, political, and economic movements and is an analysis of the ways African American beauty entrepreneurs built and sustained a vibrant culture of activism and institution building.