Beautifully written, these women’s stories not only recover the lives of previously invisible activists and entrepreneurs, but also provide a window onto the beauty salon as a site of “safety and empowerment” where black beauticians, enjoying economic autonomy and job security, could engage in subversive political work (p. Because of her efforts, membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Charleston rose from three hundred to more than one thousand. Robinson used her beauty salon in Charleston to hold voter registration drives and strategy sessions. Building a narrative of Robinson’s activism in South Carolina from a 1980 interview (conducted by Sue Thrasher and Elliot Wiggington), Gill shows how “the intersection of her economic necessity and political disappointments fueled the groundbreaking path that her life was soon to take” (p. Close looks at Walker’s economic activism and Amy Jacques Garvey’s “Our Women and What They Think” page of the Negro World reveal the ways in which African Americans navigated the tensions between race-first ideologies that chastised most modern black beauty practices and a lucrative, autonomous industry that promoted economic nationalism and strategic philanthropy. Through the story of Ezella Mathis Carter, a graduate of Spelman Seminary in 1907 and later a beauty-culture student in Chicago at the Enterprise Institute, we learn how educated clubwomen used door-to-door product demonstrations and sales to administer to the needs of poor women, engage in race work, and advance entrepreneurially independent of the masculine world of black business. Some of the strongest and most compelling parts of Gill’s monograph, in fact, are when she offers mini-biographies of black women in the beauty industry to demonstrate the intersection of commercial pursuits and social reform, as well as the connection between economic autonomy and political courage. Philip Randolph) and Bernice Robinson (cousin of the renowned civil rights leader Septima Clark). Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone, and draws attention to the roots in the black beauty industry shared by such well-known clubwomen and civil rights organizers as Mamie Garvin Fields Lucille Green Randolph (wife of A. In a tightly written narrative that moves chronologically from the late 1800s to 2007 in six chapters, Gill offers a fresh analysis of familiar early twentieth-century black businesswomen, including Madame C. Gill mines memoirs, interviews, and archival sources, such as the Negro World and the records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), to find the telling clues of black beauty culturists’ political work and recover the histories of clubs, like the National Beauty Culturists’ League (NBCL). While other scholarship on the beauty industry has highlighted how important it was for black women as a means of employment, a gateway into modernity and consumerism, and a part of the discourse on racial uplift and black pride, no one has yet looked at how black beauty culture provided opportunities for black women to develop into community leaders and political activists. Black beauty culturists worked within the space of the salon to promote opportunities for black women, strengthen their communities, and advocate for civil rights. The salon was a conflation of home and work that served as a gendered space of pampering and femininity, while it was also the site of grueling physical labor, calculated entrepreneurial pursuits, and savvy political and social activism. It was their economic autonomy, their ability to build and maintain close relationships within their communities, and their reliance on a black clientele, Gill concludes, that accounted for their significant political activism. As Gill explains in her introduction, in the early stages of her research, she was “astonished to find everyone from Martin Luther King to Ella Baker touting beauticians as key political mobilizers” and set out to understand how it was that “beauty culturists” figured so prominently in national and grassroots political campaigns (p. Throughout the twentieth century, Gill shows, African American beauticians used their unique position within their communities-which offered them a considerable degree of security and autonomy, as well as intimate connections to their clients-to engage in racial-uplift work, community organizing, and political mobilization. Along the way, she focuses on the experiences of black beauticians and connects economic autonomy, entrepreneurship, and political activism within the black beauty industry. Gill takes readers from the turn-of-the-century golden age of black business in America through the height of the black freedom struggle to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In Beauty Shop Politics, historian Tiffany M. Beautiful Hard Work: Black Beauticians at the Intersection of Labor, Beauty, Politics, and Freedom in Twentieth-Century America
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