Critical Beauty Theory 102

An analysis of “Selling Black Beauty: African American Modeling Agencies and Charm Schools in Postwar America” by Malia McAndrew

The goal of these issues is to take a brief, but critical approach to important writing about beauty culture.

Image of Ophelia DeVore, a charm school and modeling agency entreprenuer mentioned in the article.

“Selling Black Beauty: African American Modeling Agencies and Charm Schools in Postwar America” by Malia McAndrew, PhD

Historical Context:

Malia McAndrew, PhD is professor of history with a research emphasis on race, womanhood, and beauty in midcentury America. In this article, McAndrew discusses the rise of Black-owned charm schools and modeling agencies in post-WWII America. While the essay is recent, it considers the socio-political climate of the 1940s-1960s.  During this period Black women were navigating racism and sexism against the backdrop of burgeoning professional opportunities that developed because of the horrifying spread of Nazism.

Key Points:

• Black women’s representation in pre-WWII popular culture often shifted between racist caricatures like the hypersexual Jezebel and the Mammy, a non-sexual domestic figure.

• Black women owned charm schools touted that their “culturally refined” students could access greater social and economic opportunities.

  I talk about the relationship between Black women’s hair and class in Relaxers, A Retrospective

• Despite attempts to reshape beauty standards that included Black women, the results of these schools and subsequent media attention typically reified colorism.

Favorite Quote:

"Since it was popularly understood that all American women could become beautiful, cultural mandates began to require that all women should aspire to such ideals. This directive had a significant impact on how women measured both their bodies and their self-worth.”

Important Considerations:

Black charm school and modeling agency owners were walking a unique tightrope in that they were caught between the realities of a racist and sexist nation that punished them for its own irrational assumptions. These assumptions resulted in material consequences like limitations on the opportunities Black women had for economic empowerment and entrepreneurship. 

Black women were being refused the opportunity to replace their male counterparts who were serving in the military during this time. Despite struggling to meet the demands of the market, Black women had to take legal action against companies who refused to hire them. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and A. Phillip Randolph, urged President Franklin Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802, which  banned racial discrimination in the defense field. The order boosted Black women's entry into the war effort; of the 1 million African Americans who entered paid service for the first time following 8802’s signing, 600,000 were women.

It is in this socio-historical context that some Black women approached beauty and charm schools as sites for entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, their approach to beauty and charm was often colorist and supported the careers of very light-skinned Black women with long straight hair. Further, the insistence that one could reasonably improve their standing in America by purchasing these courses and products obscured the reality that the racism these women were against was enshrined into law. There is no amount of charm that would have done what Executive Order 8802 did to ban the discrimination that Black women were up against.

McAndrew makes an excellent point that “beauty entrepreneurs utilized conservative measures to achieve otherwise progressive goals,” and it is important to be critical when those goals support “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and colorist ideology.

Recommended Reading & Listening:

• “How Dorothea Towles Church Became the First Black Woman to Model for Major European Fashion Houses” by Black Fashion History

  • Podcast episode that explores Dorothea Towles Church’s professional career as a model and advocate for other Black models.

• Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham 

  • A study of how Black women in the church developed and supported important social and political movements. Also where the term "politics of respectability" was coined. The term refers to Black women in the Progressive Era who believed and promoted the idea that "reform of individual behavior as a goal in itself” would lead to improved racial conditions for everyone.

• Black Beauty: a Brief History of the African American Beauty Industry by Library of Congress 

  • A brief peek into the different means of entrepreneurial exploits of Black people interested in beauty.