| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920–1975. By Susannah Walker. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. xiv, 250 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-2433-9.)

In Style and Status, Susannah Walker examines the marketing of African American beauty ideals during the golden age of black-owned beauty products firms, from the 1920s through their demise in the 1960s and 1970s. Walker argues that African American cosmetics manufacturers and hairdressers built their consumer bases by promoting racially specific gender ideals that were not imitative of white standards. Walker situates her analysis of the rise and fall of the beauty culture industry in the contexts of other race businesses of the era, American consumer culture, and the movement of African Americans into urban wage economies in the North and elsewhere. Manufacturers and beauticians appealed to urban elite, middle-class, and working-class tastes with products and services largely differentiated by customers' abilities to spend. Consumption helped define women's class identities, and advertising reinforced images of female sexuality in establishing class differences.

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