Welcome to Working History, a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlabertudies.org. I'm series host Beth English and today I'm speaking with Blaine Roberts, associate professor of history at California State University, Fresno. She is the author of Pageants, Parlers, and Pretty Women, Race and Beauty in the 20th Century South, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Her current research focuses on the memory of slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. Blaine Roberts, welcome to Working History. Thanks so much for having me. Much of your research looks at the intersections of race, culture, and identity.
I'd like to start by talking about your book, Pageants, Parlers, and Pretty Women. Can you briefly give us an overview of the main arguments you make in the book? Sure. Well, I think what I ultimately came to is the overarching argument that in the American South, women's bodies, black women's bodies, white women's bodies, really came to express Jim Crow and civil rights culture.
I think that's a fair overarching argument. One of the ways that I came to this, one of the ways that I actually came to the entire subject is through this stereotype. I think that a lot of Americans have about white southern women being especially interested in beauty. A lot of people, I think, rightly, assume that women, southern women, white southern women are very good at beauty contests.
There's a decent amount of evidence to suggest that that's true. One big thing that brought me to the project is the fact that white southern women have really done quite well in the Miss America pageant system. If you look at the numbers, they really dominated in the 1950s and 60s. I think in the 10 years starting in 1954, that's when the Miss America pageant was first televised, white southern women won 50 percent of the Miss America titles.
That was very intriguing to me and I wanted to figure out why that was. One of the things that I eventually came to understand and appreciate is that white southern women who were entering the Miss America pageant system contests were really doing a very important work on behalf of Jim Crow and sustaining Jim Crow in this context of the civil rights movement when black southerners were really challenging Jim Crow. White southern women's bodies come to represent white supremacy. They come to represent what white southerners are fighting for and that is the sexual purity of white women and white racial purity.
These women also come to represent very valuable public relations ambassadors on behalf of the south, a white south that is not looking particularly well in the national press because of the violence that's being pitted against black southerners. These white beauty queens are really held up as symbols of gentility and a beautiful south at a time when the south is really not looking all of that beautiful. That's how it came to the project and I think that's a really good example of how women's bodies represent Jim Crow and civil rights. So let's maybe talk in just a little bit more detail in terms of how the pursuit and rituals of beauty as well as the spaces.
Beauty parlors you talk about for instance where beauty was sought in the Jim Crow south. How were they racialized? Can you give us any specific examples or an anecdote that speaks to this? Sure.
Well, first of all, the pursuit of beauty, the rituals of beauty and the spaces where beauty was pursued were very segregated. So there was really no such thing as a racially integrated beauty parlor in the Jim Crow south. The cosmetic products that were being sold to women were divided in terms of the market along racial lines. White women for example were sold cosmetics in the early to mid 20th century that in many respects were really marketed as ways to shore up their racial identity.
The ad copy and the images and the ads emphasized the fact that a particular product, say a powder or particularly a bleaching cream or bleaching agent would highlight their whiteness and their really white racial identity. So that's one example. A black beauty parlor by contrast was very racialized and as I said it was segregated. No white women would have come in.
But these spaces became very important spaces for black women's culture in the south. Spaces where these women could retreat and gather together in ways that help them fight Jim Crow. So it's a really good example of how a beauty space and a beauty ritual could serve a very divergent purpose from what it was serving in the white community. And these notions and spaces of beauty took on new and enhanced meetings during the civil right movement in the 50s and 60s.
And as you had mentioned before with the pageantry and white women sort of being symbolic of a certain kind of south. Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of black owned beauty parlors during this more active phase of the movement? Sure. Well a little bit of background to kind of set that up.
One of the things that's so important about beauty parlors in the south and beauticians is that in the early 20th century becoming a beautician for a black woman was a very attractive employment option. You know their employment options were somewhat circumscribed by race and class and so of course many black women became domestics where they worked in the fields where they worked in the factories. But the becoming a beautician was a way for a black woman to become an independent business woman. And she could have her own business where she did not have to answer to a white employer.
She had a supply chain that was most likely owned entirely by black entrepreneurs. And she could essentially work for herself. And this is really important because what goes on in beauty parlors therefore is in many ways protected. It's a safe space in black communities.
And this develops very early on in the 20th century. And so you'll see women going to these beauty parlors and of course they're gossiping like you know many women's even beauty parlors. They're talking about their families and their friends but they're also talking about community issues and community problems. And you can see them using these spaces to organize to try to solve some of these community problems.
So what happens is that as the kind of classical phase of the civil rights movement begins in the post-war years, you can actually look at beauty parlors and see beauticians becoming incredibly important civil rights activists in their communities. Just to take one example, there was a black beautician named Bernie Robinson in Charleston, South Carolina, who was a very important NAACP activist in the area. And she would quite literally take women who were sitting in her chairs in her shop down to the registrar voters to register them to vote. And so there's a very direct link between the space of the beauty parlor and then this larger kind of network of civil rights activism outside the shop.
And you can really open any African American newspaper during this classical phase of the civil rights movement even before I would argue and find stories about black beauticians and what they're doing in their communities to try to fight racial injustice. And it's really because they are independent and because they oversee these very important spaces in their communities. You also in the book look very much at the gender dimensions of beauty, not just sort of the race and racialized dimensions of beauty parlors. So let's talk a little bit more about that side of things.
How have the meanings of beauty rituals changed over time? Or what did you see happening in the course of this research you did? Sure. I think many of us today would look at a lot of beauty rituals and be fairly critical of them for objectifying women, for holding women to these ridiculous beauty standards that are harmful in many ways.
And this has been a main criticism of kind of second wave feminism. And I think that's fair. But I think that what happens when you take a longer view and look at these beauty rituals earlier say in the early 20th century, their meaning was quite different. So just to take the example of cosmetics and beauty contests.
When these first came on the scene, these were seen as real threats to male power. A woman who used cosmetics in the 19 teens, the 1920s, a white woman or a black woman, was doing something that was seen as really an act of rebellion. And particularly for white women, this was quite a big deal because any threat to white male power was really a threat to the entire sexual and racial order of the South. And so there was quite a bit of criticism of white Southern women for doing this.
But I think what's important to understand is that these women who were using these products early on, we're kind of asserting and claiming female power for themselves. Now that changes. By the time we get to say the post World War II period, I don't think it's fair to say that cosmetics use is a sign of female rebellion. It's very much normative.
And it's expected. And this of course is when the second wave feminist critique becomes important in the 1960s. You know, women shouldn't be compelled to do these things. But early on, these rituals were not really seen that way at all.
Right. And so do you see beauty rituals during this time period and practices as oppressive for women, as liberating as both? Where do you sort of come down on that? Yeah, I think this is a really complicated issue.
I hope it's not a cop out to say both. So the beauty contest, for example. One of the things that I talk about are beauty contests in the rural South in the 1930s. This is when beauty contests are still somewhat controversial for the very reasons that I just outlined.
It's not exactly acceptable for a white Southern woman to stand around in a swimsuit in the 1930s. But what happens is that there are entities in the South that find ways to make them more acceptable. And it's basically because they want to make money. You'll see agricultural trade works, for example, like the cell cotton, the cell tobacco using these contests as a way to drum up interest in their crops.
So what can happen for a white Southern woman who enters a contest, a tobacco contest where her job, if she wins, is to sell tobacco essentially with her body. On the one hand, I do think that this is an objectifying experience to stand around in some kind of abbreviated swimsuit. Or as I talk about in the book, a swimsuit made out of tobacco leaves. They actually do that as a really good way, an interesting way to advertise their crops.
That is an objectifying experience. On the other hand, as I said, because these beauty rituals are seen as kind of threats to male power, at the same time, she's claiming some power for herself and really laying claim to her sexuality at a time and in a place where it's not necessarily acceptable for women to do that. So I think it's complicated. And the other thing is that these particular rituals allow rural women who don't really have much of a life outside the home, outside of church, to open up some new venues for socialization.
So they go to agricultural festivals, like these tobacco festivals that have really been male-only spaces. They integrate these spaces because they go to these beauty contests, they bring their mothers with them, they bring their sisters with them. So my argument is that they're integrating spaces that have been off limits to them. And that's a source of power too.
So I think that rituals can be oppressive and liberating at the same time. Right. And were there sort of counterparts to these white beauty pageants within the African-American community as well? Do you see this as more of a women's commonality, even if they were segregated spaces?
Or was this really a phenomenon just of white southern women? There was some of this in the black community, not as much. I think that the significant difference here is that for the most part, it's white southern earths who are controlling the marketing of southern agriculture. And I think they recognize that most many consumers would have more interest in white southern women as the kind of face of southern agriculture.
You know, we have to keep in mind that this is the time that when images of southern women or as black women were used in marketing and advertising at all, it tended to be stereotypes like an eche-mime. I'm not sure. Right. Exactly.
And so you don't find these major marketing interests really turning to black women. And so you don't find a kind of similarly large parallel system in the black community. There are a few exceptions. Memphis, Tennessee actually had a very big beauty competition for black southern women.
That was all about cotton. And so there was that one event, but I did not find a kind of similar emphasis on beauty contests among black women in the rural south. Okay. Before we shift gears a bit and talk about your current research, what was surprising to you?
Or what was the most interesting thing that you learned when you researched and wrote Patche and Partless and Pretty Women? Well, I think one thing, it kind of goes back to the stereotypes and maybe we could even say the kind of mythology surrounding beauty in the south. I think so many Americans do associate southern beauty with white women and a real interest in beauty with white southern women. And I think over the course of my research, I came to appreciate how important the pursuit of beauty was among black women.
And it's the pursuit of beauty, but it's also the spaces, which I've already talked about a little bit and how these spaces were so important. And also the job of being a beautician. I remember distinctly being in the census records one summer when I was trying to figure out how many beauticians, white beauticians and black beauticians there were in southern states at various times. And it was quite a revelation to open up these census books for say 1920 and see that the number of black beauticians far exceeded the number of white beauticians in 1920s and 30s.
That was a real surprise and revelation for me. And what I came to appreciate is how important beauty culture was among black women in a way that wasn't necessarily among white women at the same time. It came to be that. But early on, it was much more important to black women.
So let's shift gears a bit and talk about your new research project that you had discussed earlier on in the interview, what brought you to your research on patches, parlours and pretty women. And you're now working on a project focusing on the memory of slavery focused on Charleston, South Carolina from the Civil War to the present. So what kind of shifted your focus to this particular topic? Well, about 10, 12 years ago when I just finished my PhD, my husband and I were moving to Charleston, South Carolina and the book focuses on Charleston.
And I co-wrote it with my husband and colleague, Ethan Piedel. So we were moving to Charleston because our first jobs were in the city. And we had a couple of experiences there very early on that were pretty formative, I guess you could say. We went to look for an apartment in the summer of 2005.
And the first apartment that we went to was the basement floor of an Annabelle M. Home in downtown Charleston, what people call historic Charleston. And the landlady who met us at the door and welcomed us inside was very nice and very chatty and talked to us a lot about the history of the home. And so as we're walking around the basement apartment, at one point I said, well, how would this floor have been used?
And she said, this would have been the workspace of the servants. And I kind of instinctively replied, oh, you mean of the slaves. And she said, no, the servants. And she said, there's no evidence that they weren't paid.
And it was a really striking comment that had a pretty big impression on us. And then we ended up moving there. We didn't take that particular apartment. We got a different apartment.
But it was in downtown Charleston. And one of the things that we very quickly noticed is that we were on a major tour route. So you know, stories come to Charleston every year and they will sign up for these horse-drawn carriage rides. So we could look out our front window and see a horse-drawn carriage going down the street and the tour guide would be dressed in a confederate grade costume.
And then about an hour later, we would look out and we would see a Gala tours van go by. And that particular outfit was very much about African-American heritage. So essentially what we came to see is that there was a certain amount of denial about slavery in the city, which that first episode was the Lele Reveal. And then we saw that the modern tourism industry was really very racially segregated.
And that the historical narratives that were being sold different depending on what kind of outfit you chose and that the role of slavery was therefore very different. So we started doing research about the modern tourism industry in Charleston and how slavery did and did not function into our narratives. And that's essentially how we got into the topic and then it just kind of became a much bigger project for that. Sure, sure.
So what is your research approach or your methodology to get at memory? I mean, this really sort of seems like a tricky thing to put your finger on. So what kinds of sources are you using? Are you interviewing people?
Are you going through records? How are you getting at this? Yes. Well, I think that your kind of suspicion that it is tricky is one that a lot of people share and we did too at first.
Particularly because there is an element of denial in some of this, you know, meaning white Charlestonians wanting to deny the centrality of slavery to their city's history and to our nation's history. But in actuality, what we found is that even when denial is kind of the dominant mode of remembering or misremembering, that the denial is always accompanied by a form of remembering. So slavery wasn't important to Charleston, but we were all very nice to our slaves. And so what you can do is you can look at the historical record and the kinds of archives that you would really use to write any kind of book and the memories are there.
So we haven't really struggled. We haven't had to come up with any kind of unique methodology to find these memories of slavery. You can open up the Charleston news and courier from the 1880s and find entire columns about what slavery was like in Civil War. So in terms of the specific kinds of sources, we've used really everything that we would use to write any other book, oral history interviews, newspapers, or Bible collections.
It's everywhere. Right. So what do we gain by looking at the history of the memory of slavery and how it has been remembered over such a long stretch of time, over 150 plus years? Yeah.
Well, I think one of the things that we noticed as we were writing this book is that a lot of studies of memory are a little bit truncated. So there is an entire body of literature right now that focuses on the memory of slavery or maybe the memory of the Civil War at House Museums today, or Plantations today or in museum exhibits today. And that's a very valuable body of literature, but there's no real background to it. On the other hand, there is another kind of historiographical tradition that traces the memory of the Civil War into a lesser extent slavery, say in the first 50 years after the end of the Civil War.
And so what we were finding is that there are very much these discrete parts of the story and no real link. And what we found is that in taking this longer view and going back as an entry and a half, we can tell a story that is much more connected and we can see a kind of ebb and flow in how slavery has been remembered and some kind of interesting things emerge. So sometimes I think historians, for example, look at black memories of the past, black memories of the Civil War, black memories of slavery. And we tend to label those as countermemories because they seem to exist on the sidelines, they're at the margins, they're not the kind of dominant memories that are in the public sphere.
But if you take a longer view, what you can see is that black memory was not counter memory right after the Civil War. For the first couple of decades in Charleston, black memory was the dominant memory and it was white memory that was counter memory. So the white memory is these kinds of lost-caused memories that deny the centrality of slavery to the Civil War, that deny the cruelties of slavery. Those memories do become dominant in the late 19th century and kind of remain dominant through much of the 20th century, but they very much existed on the sidelines in the 1860s, 70s and 80s.
So that's kind of one thing, I think, just an example of what you gained by taking a longer view. And the other thing is really a very long story of contestation. Different memories of slavery opposing traditions of remembering, we label them as the kind of two main traditions, what we call a whitewashed memory, which is largely about denial, largely about whitewashing the fatalities of slavery, and then the unvarnished tradition of remembering, which is a much more forthright acknowledgement of what slavery was really like. We are able to trace a very contested history between these two traditions over this 150 year period, waxing and waning, ebbing and flowing.
And why focus on Charleston in particular in terms of using that as a case study, if you want to tell the story about how Americans have remembered slavery more broadly? Yeah. Well, Charleston, we argue, is the American capitalist slavery. And there are a variety of ways in which that is true.
And I think the most obvious is the central role that Charleston played in the international and domestic slave trade. About 40% of all of the slaves that came to what became the United States came through the Charleston area. And so Charleston is very deeply tied to this incredibly traumatic history. And then throughout the antebellum period, it was a very active center of the domestic slave trade.
And so slavery really mattered to Charleston in a way that we think is exceptional. And then of course, there is a black majority, a slave majority in the area for much of its early history. So that's kind of one reason that we think Charleston is an especially useful place to study this issue. The other is that Charleston, for much of its early history, was fairly insular in some respects.
This is not entirely true, but in some respects it is. And so you have generations of families living there, generation of generation of generation. And so there's a way in which the memories of slavery really kind of hang over the area and hang over families in a way that might not be true in some other areas. The city also has some institutions that really were all about memory making.
There are a variety of cultural institutions that really focused on creating and perpetuating memories of slavery in ways that didn't happen in other places, just to take one example. In 1922, there was a society founded by some elite white Charlestonians called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. And they still exist today. And these were white, elite white Charlestonians who performed slave spirituals.
Not in black vase, as you might imagine. They actually dressed in antebellum elite garbs, so the women would wear hoops forts and the men would wear their tuxedos. And they performed all over the city. And even nationally, they went on tours.
And they took these slave spirituals and said, this is what slavery was all about. And as you might imagine, they had a fairly benign interpretation. So there are several examples like that of these institutions in the city that I think are unique. And I think it's because slavery was so important and so prominent in the city in ways that it might not have been elsewhere.
So let's fast forward just a bit to more current events. The Immanuel massacre where nine African American churchgoers were murdered in June of 2015 really trained the nation's focus to Charleston, where you've been doing this research. What does this event and the responses to it tell us about the memory of slavery in this long context that you're talking about? Yes.
Well, I think one thing that we have seen is that these two modes of remembering this whitewashed view of slavery where it wasn't that important, it wasn't that bad, and the un-arnished view where it was central to our country and it was a brutal institution. I think we can see that those two modes are still competing. Dylan Roof, if you read his manifesto, is very indebted to a whitewashed view of slavery. He said it wasn't all that bad, slaves were not poorly treated.
And so I think that the Immanuel massacre really shows us the stakes of historical memory and what it means that there are some people who still feel this way. I should say in our book, which we've just completed, we're very clear that we think that the un-arnished mode of remembering is much more accurate. And I think it's important to say that in this particular case, sometimes historians want to be dispassionate and just talk about the function of memory, how it's been used over time. But I think that one of the things that the Immanuel massacre did is that it made us realize that it's important to say that the un-arnished memories of slavery are more accurate.
So I think that that's one thing, is that Dylan Roof, on the one hand, he may be a little bit of an outlier because he took his memories and committed this horrible atrocity. But on the other hand, he's in good company and we've seen that in the response to the massacre. So yes, there has been all kinds of criticism of Confederate monuments. Why do we have these statues up to these men who fought to preserve slavery?
But there's been a very big backlash against efforts to remove these things from the landscape. And so I think this backlash suggests that the white-washed views of slavery are not going to go away anytime soon and that it's going to take a real continued conversation to try to correct, incorrect interpretations of the peculiar institution. And so how do you see your work on the memory of slavery informing current issues and movements, everything from debates over flying the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments to the Black Lives Matter movement? Yeah, well, I think one thing that we have really tried to emphasize in our conversations about our work over the last year and a half is that these contemporary controversies over these symbols, the Confederate flag, these statues, these controversies are not new.
You can look at the history of Charleston and see Black Charlestonians protesting statues in their city in the early 20th century, all the way through the mid 20th century. There's a very prominent statue of John C. Calhoun in the middle of Charleston. And Black Charlestonians defaced and graffitied that statue decades ago.
So one thing that I think our work does is that it puts these contemporary debates into a much larger context and shows that there's nothing new here. I think another thing is that all of the kind of contemporary racial concerns and issues that we're grappling with, you know, if we're talking about statues, if we're talking about mass incarceration, if we're talking about school segregation or resegregation, and what to do about it, you know, what remedies we should or should not take to solve these problems. When you get down to it, I think that in many ways our divide on how to solve these problems is really a function of a divided historical memory. And how differently we view the past.
Was slavery that important to our country? Was it really all that bad? You know, some people will say, of course it was really central. And of course it was really that bad.
And then others say that it wasn't. And I think how we answer these questions, how we view the past very much impinges upon how we're approaching these contemporary problems. Right. Do you have a publication date for this book or are you still shopping it around?
We anticipate that it will be out in about a year to 16 months from now. We're currently talking literally this week, talking to publishers. So we hope to have that sorted out within about two weeks. Okay, great.
Well, definitely looking forward to that. I was a big fan of your first book. So I'll be looking forward to this one as well. Blaine Roberts, thank you very much for joining us on this episode of Working History.
Thanks so much for having me. I've enjoyed it. Thanks again to Blaine Roberts, associate professor of history at California State University Fresno. She is the author of Pageants, Parlers and Pretty Women, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Our current research focuses on the memory of slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. And thank you for listening to this episode of Working History, produced by the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org and follow Working History on Twitter at Working History.