BONUS: The Marvels of Madam C.J. Walker Part 2

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I'm Alex von Tunselmann, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

In the early 20th century, Madam C.J.

Walker was one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire.

Even more surprising than that, she was black.

We covered her story on history's heroes a few episodes ago.

If you haven't heard that, I recommend you go back and listen to it before this one.

Madame Walker was the first person in her family to be born free from slavery, but she was born on the plantation where her parents had been enslaved, and grew up orphaned and destitute.

She made her fortune by developing hair care products specifically for black people, and especially by marketing her products in a very modern way, with herself as a celebrity spokesmodel, a century before the Kardashians.

Amazing as all this sounds, her beauty empire was not without its controversies.

Though she said she was in the business of growing hair, not straightening it, some felt that her aesthetics still pushed black women towards white European standards of beauty.

Over the last century, questions about beauty and race haven't gone away.

In fact, they may be more fraught than ever.

I'm keen to know more about the politics of beauty and how they've changed, or perhaps haven't, since the days of Madame Walker.

So I've invited Professor Alca V.

Menon to tell us more.

She's Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University and studies the relationship between medicine, technology, and society with a focus on race and racism.

She's the author of Refashioning Race, How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards.

Alca, thank you very much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So let's start if we can with Madame C.J.

Walker.

Our listeners have heard about her life, but how much did she and black women like her change the beauty industry?

They really did transform the beauty industry.

There were products available to black women before they took off these entrepreneurs, but they were often ones that were produced by much larger corporations that were primarily aiming at a clientele of white customers.

And so what Madam C.J.

Walker and some of her competitors were doing was saying, hey, we can offer products for hair care for you and for those around you, meeting you where you are and helping you with the goals that you have to grow your hair for example and they did it in this way that also encouraged the building of community between black women this idea that we can mail these things to you and you can then have point people in the community who you could go to and access those products from so was she in her time a controversial figure or is this one of those cases of modern people looking back and feeling like she's regressive by modern standards?

I think at the time she was actually held up as generally a marker of success in the Black community.

She was a self-made millionaire.

She had come from very humble origins, and she was featured in Black business council meetings as an example of someone to emulate.

So I think that generally she was regarded as a hero within the community in her time, but there were voices, even in her time, questioning the kinds of beauty ideals that she was espousing for Black women.

She drew a line again, as you said, between the beauty ideals for growing hair versus straightening them.

But even that was seen as being closer to Eurocentric ideals than other ways of preparing hair.

And so that was something that was taken up in the black press to some degree and just in conversations in the black community.

And when she died in 1919, mainstream white beauty standards in Europe and the U.S.

were about to go into flux, weren't they?

I mean, there's enormous change from the corsets, flowing hair, fresh faces of the Bellapoc to suddenly the roaring 20s, straight figures, short bobs, heavy makeup, very different look.

I mean really one of the most visible changes in the history of fashion and style.

And how did that affect women of color?

I think that it did open up what was possible to do or desirable to do with beauty for women of colour too.

That there wasn't this notion that there was one respectable look to go for for most women, but that there was a proliferation of ideals.

And And there was a kind of openness to figuring out what the modern woman should look like, right?

What that could be for women of color.

Black women also pursued bobs, for example, once they became popular.

This idea that just growing hair wasn't the only possible goal, that having the longest hair possible wasn't the end-all be-all for what it meant to have fashionable hair.

So there was an opening up in that time and some experimentation in that period, even as there also emerged certain through lines like the Bob that became immediately recognizable as a feature of the modern woman.

And I mean, did that sort of change also make it possible for people to conceive of the idea that if this change could happen, this really massive change, that actually it was possible to have perhaps more diverse, different styles that could be in fashion that might suit different people from the people who'd been in charge before?

There were two things that happened in this period that pointed to a different way for how people could look or kind of opening up of beauty standards.

One was the sense that maybe beauty standards were not time-bound and universal historically, right?

You could see, you knew that what you looked like and what your mother looked like were different.

And it was not just simply a matter of the braid style that you put in your hair, but something more

emblematic of a change in identity as well.

But the other thing that happened was the development of a mass market, right?

So that's the big thing that's happening in the 1920s that wasn't there to the same extent before.

You know, Madam C.J.

Walker's time was the development of a market and to some extent, a national market for beauty products, but Madame C.J.

Walker was making these products at home initially and mailing them to people, right?

So what was really happening was this creation of a larger public and a larger scale of both marketing and the sort of sending out of products.

And so once you have this larger market and this recognized possibility of appealing to different kinds of people, you could approach it in two ways.

You could create one set of products for everybody in that market, or as many people as you think you could appeal to, or you could think about what segments of the market that you want to hit first.

And arguably Madam C.J.

Walker's business was an early attempt to do that, to think about, okay, I really know this segment of the market that has been underserved, which is black women.

And so I'm going to offer things for them.

But once she paved that path, it really opened up a lot of business opportunities for other entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, to say, well, what kind of person would you like to be?

What do you want to show others about yourself?

And how do you want to show that on the body?

Here are some products that

won't break the bank, but do present something so that you can experiment and that you can try it out.

And the 1920s was really ushering in that era of experimentation, affordable experimentation to a mass market.

There is this big change in fashion and style, but we can still see, even through that change, that some of the beauty ideals at the time were clearly in the US and Europe very much rooted in what was admired about white women.

Slim figures, straight hair, pale skin, teeny little retrussee noses.

Historically though, where did this come from?

These particular ideals are associated with a class of white women.

These were traits that were often attributed to members of high society who were very young and represented the kind of leading lights of the day and who might be talked about or photographed at the time, or made portraits of, so that people might know what they looked like.

So, it was not that this is what most white women looked like, but that this was a socially salient set of white women who had these traits.

And so, other people wanted to emulate them.

So, that's one feature of it.

The other angle here is that, you know, this is the 1920s.

This is, you know, before that too, in the 1800s, people are really thinking about a racial hierarchy in which white people are at the top.

This has been challenged by people by this time, not just by abolitionists in laying the groundwork for the abolition of slavery, but also the sense that maybe whiteness didn't have to be equivalent to civilization writ large, right?

And often this was discussed in the realms of intelligence, education, achievements in other domains.

But beauty was an important area where this played out too, right?

The initial identification of races and a racial hierarchy came out of a particular colonial project in Europe that wanted to put white people at the top.

And beauty ideals kept that hierarchy in place, even as there were these changes with the larger economic structure and what's possible and what people are trying to achieve going forward, right?

It was a time of flux, but it didn't mean that everything was immediately changed over at the same time.

So how can we see that changing?

So by the 1920s, you have black nationalist movements in major U.S.

cities where there is an explicit calling out among mostly black male leaders at the time, like Marcus Garvey, of the unquestioning attempt to emulate white Americans or white Europeans and white beauty standards.

And this sort of sense of saying we need to declare our independence as black people and we need internal reference for what black beauty looks like, for what black respectability looks like, that are not tied to the things that were happening in white society around them.

So that was one alternative vision for what could be happening and part of a move to create different kinds of beauty products and ideals to appeal to the people who were adherents of those social movements at the time.

But there were also changes in the scientific and political power structures within the United States and European nations.

Decolonization became a possibility.

World War I happened.

The hierarchies of political power that entrenched particular white leaders as the emperors or the de facto governors of polities across the world began to be shaken, if not totally disrupted.

That took a little bit longer into the World War II era.

And so the sense that, okay, maybe these folks in Europe, in the United Kingdom, in the US, didn't have to be both the political leaders of a place, but also didn't have to be the cultural touchstones either, that there could be other things.

Let's look at it as a global story, because I think that's really interesting and it does vary.

I mean, you know, when we look at how these beauty ideals were transmitted around the world, certainly if we look at the early 20th century, that's the high point of the British Empire in terms of its territorial expanse.

It's also the beginning of really mass media that is going across the world as well as part of that too, of you know, radio, but also magazines and newspapers and all of this being transmitted.

Did some parts of the world that weren't colonized develop different ideals of beauty?

I think that you can see different stories or narratives about beauty ideals in other parts of the world.

So a lot of my research focuses on Asia and there are very long

attempts to trace the preference for something like a round face or bigger eyes to art that comes from periods that are prior to colonization, saying a round moon face, very bright round eyes are something that you can see in ancient scrolls and that are lauded in poetry.

So you do see this kind of continued

attachment, attention, holding up of these alternative beauty ideals that really don't come through a colonial pathway.

But it's so hard to say that anything is separate because even countries that were not formally colonized did trade with colonial powers or they traded with people who came under colonial rule.

So this notion that there was anywhere that was outside and totally unaffected by the colonial encounter is a really tough line to draw because this was an encounter that shaped things on both sides.

I want to kind of take you around the world and look at some of those different stories in different places.

Let's start by looking then at India.

I mean, in India, cosmetics have historically in the 20th century had a big focus on skin lightening, on this pale skin ideal.

It has been very controversial.

The famous moisturizer, Fair and Lovely, changed its name in 2020 to Glow and Lovely.

Is that preference for lighter skin then, you know, something that was very related to British colonialism?

Or as you say, can we look back into Indian history or perhaps laterally around kind of the way that India is shaped in terms of the north versus the south to see that that's come from complicated different sources?

Yes.

So this preference for lightness is something that has been observed in India, in China, in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and it coincides with the period of colonial rule, too, where white people were in charge and white people were held up as the model of civilization.

But it is certainly the case that there is a class dimension to this preference that predates colonial intervention, right?

To be fair in a place with a very sunny and hot climate meant that you likely had the resources to stay inside, which signified something very material at that in a marriage market, especially for women.

So it meant that women didn't have to work.

And that was a status symbol in its own right.

If you were a rich man looking to have a wife that signified your wealth, a

lighter person could do that.

And so anything that would make people lighter, that would show that sign, would be desirable in that context.

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Now, you've done a lot of work on different global standards in cosmetic surgery, particularly, which I think is a really fascinating field and how that's related to all of this.

So, let's look slightly further east, look to East Asia.

Very, very different colonial experiences.

Some countries, like Vietnam, were kind of fully colonized, others, such as Thailand, were very closed off and barely colonised at all.

Others, still, you've got China and Japan had quite complicated relationships with Europeans, trading relationships and

different periods of different engagement.

But we hear a lot from East Asia about certain types of surgery that might be thought to have a European aesthetic.

Things like eyelid surgery to turn your eyelids from a sort of slanted look to a rounder look or leg lengthening, which obviously makes you taller.

Where do these come from?

This is a great question.

I think...

This is another one of those examples where you can find preferences for, let's start with the eyelid one, for example.

You can find a preference for a rounder eye over a slanted eye in some degrees of

physiognomy or face reading traditions in Japan, in Korea, and in China that would predate the colonial encounters, complicated as they were across those places.

And there's another colonial encounter that's very important for understanding beauty ideals and the development of cosmetic surgery in Asia, which is actually Japan's imperial ambitions in the area in the 1900s, the late 1800s, all the way to World War II, where Japan did occupy and colonize parts of Korea, parts of China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia, Malaysia, where I did my research.

I found evidence that Japanese cosmetic surgeons or plastic surgeons were doing these eyelid surgeries, blepharoplasties in particular, in the late 1800s, and that they were writing textbooks about it, that they were sharing their techniques mostly in Japanese.

So the Japanese were doing these surgeries early, and then the Americans come to the region, specifically to Korea, for the first time with the Korean war to combat communism.

With the Korean occupation and the U.S.

military presence there, there were several plastic surgeons, plastic and reconstructive surgeons who stayed in Korea for some time and offered surgeries not just to correct the wounds of war, which was most of what they were doing for both American and Korean fighters or people caught in the crossfire, but also for locals who said, you know, my kid has a cleft lip.

Can you fix this?

Or my eyelids are asymmetrical.

Can you do something about that?

And surgeons were willing to do this to help train the next generation of surgeons.

That was one major motivation why Americans would do this.

But also they thought it did build some goodwill for this American presence in the community.

And as they became more familiar and there for longer, some Korean women would ask for a rounder eyelid with the hope of appealing to American men to have relationships that could lead to marriage or just to make a better living in the sex work industry.

And so at that time, American surgeons published several articles on how to do these eyelid procedures that explicitly called them

transformations from an Oriental to a Western look.

Gosh, this is so completely fascinating.

I am going to take you on a world tour because I want to know about how these have developed in other places as well.

What about in Africa itself?

Now, obviously, Africa is this huge, very diverse continent.

We can't say one thing is remotely going to be the same in Morocco or Egypt as it is in Southern Africa or anything.

You know, it's immensely, immensely diverse.

How have the beauty standards there developed?

And are there these huge variations as we do see in, for instance, cultures or languages there?

You see variation in the types of hair texture that's desirable, in the facial features and structures that are desirable, in whether or not scarification on the face, which have associations with tribal identification, are desirable and what they signify in the context of rapidly developing, modernizing nation states in the 1950s onwards.

So there's quite a bit of churn and of different communities about what people are pursuing, but there's also the development of a mass market for selling the kinds of products that we started with at the beginning, skin lightening creams, for example, or skin bleaching.

So these preferences that again may have existed in some communities within Africa before for lighter skin met a global market ready to provide them with products to do so or to promise to do so, whether or not they actually could deliver.

And so certainly that is in the more recent periods a market that has grown, even as some countries have also pushed back on this, like

with formal legal sort of prescriptions on these skin bleaching things, or just more informal cultural lobbying of companies, just as was the case in India with Fair and Lovely.

It seems to me like we can't really talk about the story of modern beauty standards without also talking about Latin America, which has, I think, helped to drive some of the changes in beauty standards we've seen in recent years, notably the trend for fuller figures that's come with such things as the famously named Brazilian butt lift designed to give you a bigger, rounder backside.

Latin America is racially complicated and very diverse.

So what's been driving these kind of changes there?

When we're thinking about plastic surgery in Latin America, the Brazilian states and other states in the continent, including Argentina, made plastic surgery available early on with the development of public health insurance systems as something that would be covered by public health and by the insurance system with the idea that it would give people a self-esteem boost, that it was equivalent in some ways to forms of psychotherapy that would help people lift depression or feeling self-conscious about their bodies.

So people from all over the world went to train with Brazilian plastic surgeons.

There's a lot of competition.

There's a lot of plastic surgeons.

And so people try different looks that they don't expect everyone is going to get.

You know, Brazilian butt lifts were were not something that everybody in Brazil were necessarily aspiring to, but there was a market for it.

It's a huge country, and there was a market for it globally.

And that change has been driven, at least in part, by celebrities like the Kardashians, who are of Armenian and European descent, and by the incredible cultural power of black and mixed-race celebrities like Beyoncé, Nikki Minaj, Lizzo, and so on, who pursue very different looks from this conventional white European mainstream.

Are beauty standards just completely diversified now?

There has been, I think, a disruption in the idea that a few key gatekeepers can set what beauty standards is.

We no longer look to vogue in the United States for one sense of what we should all be aspiring to.

And then anyone who seeks something different is counterculture or not mainstream, right?

There is cachet in not being mainstream.

So that fundamentally has changed.

But this doesn't mean that we really see things moving in all directions all the time, right?

We don't tend to see people who are trying to look very, very dark, right?

There's still a market for lightning creams in the United States and worldwide.

We don't tend to see people, except in very specific circumstances, getting the Asian eyelid surgery to have a narrower slanted eye.

I think what's happened is just that there's been a real diversification and proliferation in the gatekeepers themselves.

Cosmetic surgeons identify as being one important gatekeeper because you have to at least get, as a person who's seeking a particular look, one cosmetic surgeon to get on board with that in order for it to happen.

You cannot do these procedures to yourself.

And you also look to celebrities, like some of the ones that you mentioned, as examples of what to look for.

And so you do, in most cases, have to see someone out there in the world as an illustration of why this would be desirable to do in the first place, why someone is looking to them.

Beauty remains a hierarchy, a social hierarchy where some people are seen as superior and more beautiful than others.

And so people are still trying to ascend the hierarchy for the most part.

It's just that there's more ways to do that.

And there's more potential hierarchies that you could subscribe to now than there were before.

So what I think is interesting in this proliferation is both the influences from other countries.

on the West.

So we talked about Latin America with the Brazilian butt lift.

Korea has become a cosmetic surgery surgery powerhouse, developing procedures like jawbone shaving that simply would not have existed before.

Even in Europe, there's been more types of breast implants invented and used than there have been in the United States.

People in different countries are more open to the influences and ideas from other places.

Beauty is a trend, it's a fashion, and so it's not going to be static all the time.

I do think we're not in the 1990s, you know, extreme, thin era.

On the other hand, I think the pendulum is in some ways already swinging back to thinner, away from curvier, which has really been ascendant in the last 10 to 20 years.

And that's in part because of the rise of a new drug for weight loss, GLP-1, sometimes popularly known as Ozempic.

Once there's some new way of achieving a beauty ideal and there's a strong marketing campaign behind it and awareness of it, then people will migrate there.

There are multiple stories circulating for what is beautiful and why you would want to achieve it, but which stories get elevated in a particular moment for what kinds of transformations and changes that people want change depending on what the tools are available, the popularity, the awareness of them, whether those are cosmetics, whether they're plastic surgeries, or whether they're pharmaceutical drugs like Ozempec.

And as you say, these things often have a very clear material connection, don't they?

So, you know, the thing that's fashionable is the thing that's expensive to achieve.

So suntans become fashionable in Europe when, just when agricultural workers all move inside to factories.

And maybe, you know, once the patents start expiring on Azempic, suddenly being thin will not be desirable because everybody will be thin on cheap Azempic.

Exactly.

And I think that's an important dimension that does.

get lost a little bit because you can't separate out race or nationality or gender from class and from what's going on broadly in society about the relative status of different groups.

They're all intertwined together, and that's why it shifts.

It's not just that the cultural demand for change is there, but that the underlying population itself changed, which made, you know, achievement of status, of distinction, something that required a new intervention.

Now, bringing it back to Madame C.J.

Walker, you've talked a bit about gatekeepers.

I think a lot of people will be wondering, look, who gets to decide what beauty standards are?

Who gets to to be in charge of this?

In a way, Madam C.J.

Walker, one of her big innovations, of course, was pioneering this kind of personality-led branding with herself as the star of the cosmetics line.

And that feels really, really modern to me.

Was she very much ahead of her time?

Was she the influencer of the Bella Pock?

I think she could be understood and seen that way.

I think that

She wanted to make her brand seem more accessible by sharing her own story.

She did not disguise her origins.

She wanted it to be

an aspirational story for African-American women who wanted to get ahead in life.

And it was both she wanted to set a model for potential consumers who were looking for products to look like her or to look like people like her.

But also, what was especially interesting about Madame C.J.

Walker is that she was giving people the tools to also become entrepreneurs themselves and to improve their own economic standing.

And so, in that sense,

she was not just saying, be like me, like look like me, but get ahead like me, which we see in modern influencer efforts as well.

But I think was an appeal at the time that was especially new, that this is something that we could spread and grow this wealth and this business together.

If Madame Walker could come and look at the modern beauty industry, what do you think she'd make of it?

Madame Walker would be pretty astonished by the array of products, by the number of jars that people have on a vanity shelf, by the range of ways people look walking down the street, right?

There are several very dramatic changes that have happened.

On the other hand, if she went onto TikTok or Instagram and went through a series of videos, she might actually recognize some of the appeals there, right?

That people

are hustling.

and using themselves as centers of their brands to reach other people and to form connections.

I think that part would feel more familiar.

I think she would see the through lines.

Thank you so much, Alca V.

Menon, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

Thanks so much for joining me on History's Heroes.

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