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 Blain Roberts, author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South, discusses the history of southern beauty.

Q: You grew up in a small town in southwest Louisiana—what about your upbringing and background made you interested in the topic of beauty?

Blain Roberts (photo by Jackson Kytle)

A: It’s probably fair to say that I absorbed certain ideas about southern women and beauty growing up in the South, but I don’t think I gave them much thought until I left the region after high school. In New Jersey, where I attended college, I noticed that my female peers from the South presented themselves differently than did my female classmates from other parts of the country. So even though we were all students during the height of the Seattle grunge craze, for example, women from the South were more likely to wear their flannel shirts and jeans with fully made-up faces.

At the same time, I also became aware of the fact that non-southern classmates, male and female, made certain assumptions about southern women, and the South more generally, and I became interested in the origins and consequences of those assumptions. Eventually, this issue—the relationship between the South and the rest of the country in terms of ideas about and practices of beauty—became one of the themes of the book.

Q: To what extent did southerners, both white and black, equate “southern beauty” with the southern belle? Did those perceptions change over the course of the twentieth century, and how?

A: For most of the twentieth century, white southerners thought of the southern belle (or the southern lady, her older counterpart) when they thought of “southern beauty.” This means that white southerners tended to equate southern beauty with whiteness. Most white southerners would not have considered a black woman to be a southern beauty. And yes, there was change over time: the image of the beautiful southern lady was gradually democratized. Though ladies and belles existed during the antebellum era, they were of elite status and relatively few in number. By the post-World War II period, a variety of factors—cosmetics advertising and practices and increased economic prosperity, to name a few—made it possible for more and more white women to claim to be beautiful southern ladies themselves.

The image of the beautiful southern belle/lady was, by definition, racially exclusive, and many black women would have keenly felt its discriminatory power. There were occasions, however, when individuals and institutions attempted to claim the image for black women, to challenge its underlying racial assumptions and reframe its meaning. An interesting example is a photo spread that ran in Ebony magazine in 1971 entitled “Belles of the South” that featured young women from southern historically black colleges. The magazine said very explicitly that it wanted to prove that not all southern beauties were white—that black women were belles of the South, too.
Q: The power of advertising plays a large role in the public perception of beauty. Can you describe some of the potent examples of how beauty products and their advertising favored and encouraged racial standards of beauty?

A: The use of the southern lady in advertising is actually a great example of this phenomenon. One manufacturer of cosmetics in the early twentieth century, the National Toilet Company of Paris, Tennessee, based one of its major marketing campaigns on the southern lady, including images of southern ladies in ads and praising their beauty as every white southern woman’s birthright. This was all the more significant because some of the company’s best-selling products were lightening powders and bleaching creams—products, in other words, designed to make white women’s skin whiter.

Advertising aimed at black southern women promoted racial standards of beauty in ways that might seem shocking to people today. At the turn of the century, one Richmond, Virginia, company marketed a hair straightener and a bleaching cream called “black skin remover” by showing before-and-after images in its ads. The before picture was a woman who was clearly black; the after picture was of a woman who was clearly white. That said, some early black female entrepreneurs like Madam C. J. Walker fought hard to undermine these kinds of images in their own ad campaigns. Walker, for example, argued that her hair products grew, not straightened, hair. She emphasized the importance of healthy hair to personal respectability and race pride.

Q: Readers might be surprised by how beauty was used to resist and achieve desegregation in the Civil Rights Movement. How did that differ from the use of beauty in the Jim Crow Era?

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