Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth‐Century SouthBlainRoberts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Abstract

Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century Blain Roberts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.Positioning itself in conversation with influential histories of the senses like Mark M. Smith's Flow Race is Made (2007), Blain Roberts's Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women illuminates how Southern culture has imagined a constitutive relationship between race and beauty. The book develops an intuitive structure with alternating chapters on white and black women and then concludes with integrated analyses of cultures of in the age of the Civil Rights Movement.Though Roberts's compelling introduction promises a racially inclusive history of beauty as well as an analysis of regional differences in practices, those aims are not equally represented in the book's chapters (7). Productive insights emerge in contrasting the rural and urban South, but other regions are largely absent. There is also the question of timeline, which extends from World War I to Vietnam, rather than the span of the twentieth century evoked in the book's subtitle. Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women speaks to the New South rather than the Dirty South, fixating on the fictional Georgian belle Scarlett O'Hara rather than on, for example, the real of Texan Erykah Badu.As surprising as it might seem to contemporary Americans-who stereotype white Southern womanhood as invested in artifice and excess-Roberts's first chapter evinces an early culture war over cosmetics. Elite white planter women associated paint and rouge with prostitutes, but the intra-war period produced a culture that hitched its products to modernity and progress. Makeup became a way to leave behind rural poverty, isolation, and backwardness (31). Chapter 2 posits progress as a link between black and white cultures. Visions of progress were projected onto women's bodies, whether in marketing to white women or in the black elite's construction of respectability politics. Black women were attacked for both imitating whiteness and being too black; culture produced pitfalls even as it provided opportunities for entrepreneurship within a community where women as well as men participated in the labor market.Pageants funded by the agricultural and tobacco industries as well as by the Cooperative Extension System produced a white Southern ideal that was both racialized and ruralized, as Roberts demonstrates in Chapter 3 (107). …