Contents:
  • Introduction: Finding politics in unexpected places : the matrix of beauty, business, and activism
  • Beauty pioneers : racial uplift and gender in the creation of a Black business community
  • "Link up with us" : Black beauty culture, racial politics, and the complexities of modern Black womanhood
  • "This industry is not typical, but exceptional" : redefining entrepreneurship and activism in the 1930s and 1940s
  • "We could turn the whole world over" : the international presence of African American beauticians in the postwar era
  • "Black beauticians were very important" : Southern beauty activists and the modern Black freedom struggle
  • "Among the things that used to be" : beauticians, health activism, and the politics of dignity in the post-civil rights era.