Quotes from Kathy Peiss

When asked how much time she invested in taking care of her body, Edith Enders, married to an abusive husband, scrawled, "not as much as I would were I a free citizen or as I did before I was in bondage to a despot.

At the same time, "movie autobiographies" written for the Blumer study suggest that woemn's relationship to the screen was less direct imitation than a negotiation between one's sense of self and the ideal female images.

Product demonstrations, long used within beauty culture, were embraced by mass marketers, not only to sell specific brands but to acclimate women to systematic cosmetics use .

That hidden demonstrators existed at all, however, is also testimony to the established tradition of beauty culture and to the significance of women's everyday beauty rituals. In employing demonstrators, manufacters acknowledged that the cosmetics business required more than fantasy images of glamour and romance. It required communicating cosmetic information, educating consumers, providing services, and fostering women's sociability.

Even when they proclaimed themselves dupes and victims of consumer culture, women did not renounce makeup, for it had become a common language of self expression and self-understanding.

Having challenged an earlier regime of female respectability and moralism, advertisers came to advance what would become key tenets of normative femininity in the twentieth century. Ironically, a period that began with cosmetics signaling women's freedom and individuality ended in binding feminine identity to manufactured beauty, self-portrayal to acts of consumption.

As they left behind a world of servility and inferiority, consumers adopted beautifying as an essential aspect of becoming modern African-American women. Still, the ideal they favored remained a painfully restrictive one.

However, it was also the mounting discontent among Africn Americans, feminists, and gay activists that challenged the widespread acceptance and commercial exploitation of the governing beauty ideals.

One became a woman in an act of making up that was, incongruously, inherent to feminine nature.

Even movie and romance magazines, whose beauty ads explicitly connected makeup and sex appeal, maintained a logic that downplayed women's sexual assertion: A woman acted upon her desire for a man by making herself beautiful, in order to catch his attention and awaken his desire.

Indeed, cosmetic ads endlessly reminded women that they were on display, especially conspicuous in a world peopled by spectators and voyeurs: [...] Women were thus urged to transform the spectacle of themselves into self-conscious performances.

ethnicity, defined as style could, like makeup, be easily applied and washed off.

To make the mask invisible involved not just creating a natural look, but training the eye to perceive makeup as a natural feature of women's faces.

The public debate over cosmetics today veers noisily between the poles of victimization and self-invention, between the prison of beauty and the play of makeup.