INTRODUCTION
From antiquity to modern times, people through the ages have been obsessed with health and beauty, and no wonder. Personal appearance has always been linked to power, status, morality, and self-identity. And yet perceptions of beauty depend on the eye of the beholder and vary with race, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, class, and historical period.
This book looks at women’s pursuit of health and beauty, chiefly in Britain, and at how this pursuit has evolved over the last four hundred years. The subject risks being dismissed as trifling, but it brings insights into the deeper realities of life. It shows women not just as consumers but as agents trying to determine their place in the world. It touches upon such varied topics as self-identity and the role of women, mostly white and well-to-do, in furthering trade and colonisation. And it shows how notions of beauty helped to marginalise other women, including those who were victims of colonisation.
Of course, women have always adorned and shaped their bodies according to personal preference and convention. Health and beauty tips circulated widely in oral culture and featured in household manuals long before the production of makeup and toiletries became megaindustries. But personal adornment is a form of communication; it can
signify social status and even political opinion. The subject of health and beauty also throws light on issues of gender identity, since the body is integral to our experience and performance of gender.
Health and beauty concerns are life-changing, which helps to explain why they are so often linked to wish-fulfilment stories and why beauty products routinely promise some fairy-tale transformation. This attractive possibility helps to explain the enduring popularity of the Cinderella story and the appeal of television makeover programmes. The story has been told in its present form since the seventeenth century, while adaptations for opera and film have encouraged gender-fluid interpretations, helping to keep it relevant. Even so, the ambiguity of the Cinderella tale reflects the ambivalence of many tips about health and beauty, which often fail to have any effect. Cinderella is usually defined in contrast to her ‘ugly’ or proud sisters but she is not necessarily pretty. What marks her out is the size of her foot, which few adults can alter. Her shoe size hints at an innate claim to higher status; even in Victorian times, small feet were taken to be a sign that the owner did not belong to ‘the walking classes’.1
There is a dark side to this long-standing preoccupation with personal appearance. Some early makeup contained white lead and other dangerous ingredients that seared the skin; in extreme cases, wearing a corset and tight-lacing for a petite waist deformed the rib cage; the history of dental care has its own gallery of horrors. Women’s quest for beauty holds dangers even today. Crazes such as CoolSculpting, or the freezing of unwanted fat cells, have led to disfigurement. Home treatments purchased online can also carry risks: Apetamin, a drug which promises weight gain and fashionable, Kardashian-type curves, has been linked to liver damage. But health and beauty advice has always mixed sensible tips with flavour-of-the-month panaceas. This book throws a spotlight on historic fads, and it produces surprising revelations. A spa town was often no health retreat but a glorious opportunity to indulge in a giddy round of entertainment. Sea bathing for the constitution prompted voyeurism on a startling scale. Men carried telescopes, not to look out to sea, but to train them on beach beauties. Even supposedly
staid Victorian women clustered near bathing machines to watch men swimming naked.
Health and beauty topics are always newsworthy because we all have a body. Variations only add interest. We may be tall or short, have proportionally longer legs and arms, or a longer spine (which makes for a smaller waist). And we all change shape as we grow up and grow old. The relative plasticity of the body encourages us to think that with inclination and resolve we can mould it to whatever shape is the current ideal. And the growth of industries producing dietary supplements shows that health is understood to be integral to achieving the desired look. Just as our identity is formed through social interaction, so our body is shaped by social and cultural forces which motivate us to adapt it. In turn, the appearance and condition of our bodies influence our physical and emotional experience. We are always conscious of the effect our appearance has on others, which is why many of us like to edit selfies. The body is so firmly implicated in a range of power relations that personal appearance can be a source of anxiety, although women do take pleasure in beauty products and the opportunities they offer for self-expression. In short, individuals naturally desire to control their own bodies. To the extent that anyone can be bothered, the body can also be treated as an artwork. In the early twentieth century, artists associated with futurism did just that and wrote a manifesto about it. Historically, women’s bodies have been moulded in ways calculated to improve their life chances. This examination of women’s pursuit of health and beauty over four hundred years illuminates their position in society, their role within the family, and changes over time. Beauty practices are inevitably connected to class because beauty is highmaintenance and takes time and money. A focus on health and beauty also illuminates a broader context of social, cultural, racial, economic, and political factors. In tracing how women presented themselves, we can gain insights into their experience of contemporary science and medicine, or of changing patterns of consumption with the growth of empire. Many white women mentioned in this book were Londoners
when the capital was an imperial metropolis. Their lives offer opportunities to glimpse how empire was experienced ‘at home’, just when an ideal of female beauty was closely connected to Britain’s sense of its ‘civilising mission’ in the colonies. Finally, the material culture relating to health and beauty reveals changing social values, especially regarding hygiene. To explore a history of health and beauty is to get a better understanding of how we have come to think about modernity.
It can be hard to find women’s voices from the past. Only the elite could devote funds and leisure to their personal appearance, so it is even more difficult to trace opinions from the lower classes and women of colour. In some sources it helps to think about what is not being said. And since beauty is often treated as competitive, accounts can be intentionally unfair. Many of the examples included here are of elite white women who were knowingly on display and understood that their entire appearance conveyed a spectrum of meanings that would be assessed; but other voices feature wherever possible.
BEAUTY AND OPPRESSION
There is a long tradition of criticising women for enhancing their looks. For centuries, women of all classes were discouraged from the overt pursuit of beautification, which is one reason why it is hard to find them writing about it. Such censure can seem deeply misogynistic, as in Jonathan Swift’s poem ‘The Progress of Beauty’ (1719), which describes how a young woman rises from her pillow a mass of dirt and sweat. She needs four whole hours at her dressing table before she can pass for a beautiful woman. The same theme was often rehearsed in satirical prints, as in Thomas Rowlandson’s Six Stages of Mending a Face (1792), which shows an ageing woman transforming her appearance with a wig, a fake eye, false teeth, and cosmetics. Rowlandson’s immediate target was Lady Archer, an aristocrat who hosted private gambling parties. These parties were technically illegal, and ladies who played for high stakes were eventually fined in 1797. While Archer happened to
be a redhead, not a good look at the time, the chief cause of Rowlandson’s disgust was the amount of makeup she wore. It indicated that she was basically ugly and had something to hide. Male criticism of women using fake hair and fake teeth resurfaced in the Victorian period, after progress in the manufacture of dentures lowered prices and brought them to the masses.2 The fear of not being able to distinguish between true beauty and the artificial kind is a deep-seated one.
Makeup itself has long produced moral uncertainty. In some contexts, visible makeup was associated with prostitution; in others, it made women seem more respectable. There is a kind of ambivalence in the very process of making up, since, as soon as onlookers notice its effects, they become aware of a difference between the veneer of makeup and the face itself. After 1850, the anxiety surrounding women’s use of cosmetics and what the habit said about their temperament was compounded by notorious court cases involving wives charged with poisoning their husbands. Arsenic was easily obtainable in the Victorian era; some white women ate it for a youthful pallor. Branded arsenic wafers (pills) and arsenical lotions to remove blemishes were openly marketed. They worked by poisoning the blood so that it carried fewer red blood cells to organs; anaemia then left the skin clear and pale. The body can tolerate a little arsenic but when husbands died in mysterious circumstances, wives were suspected of feeding them large quantities. The crime was hard to prove but in one notorious case Florence Maybrick was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1889 for murdering her husband with arsenic. Only an element of doubt saved her from being hanged.
Criticism of women’s clandestine use of cosmetics was heightened by the controversy surrounding Madame Rachel Leverson, whose beauty treatments were not only fraudulent but also seemed to encourage her female customers to deceive men. She set up shop in London around 1860, selling exotic-sounding beauty products. Her business failed and she was sent to debtors’ prison. On her release she tried again; this time, due to her flair for advertising, she began to prosper. The title of her marketing pamphlet was ‘Beautiful for Ever’
and it became her catchphrase. She targeted older women and specialised in ‘enamelling’ the face and décolletage. This was a form of face painting. The skin was prepared with an alkaline wash, then painted with a semi-paste of whitening agents, which also helped to fill wrinkles and depressions. Well-to-do women visited Leverson’s premises in secret, as the process was frowned upon. She soon dabbled in intimidation and fraud – blackmailing clients to pay her large sums for continued treatment and secrecy, even convincing one woman that she had gained the affections of an aristocrat.
Madame Rachel was tried for fraud in 1868, found guilty, and given a five-year sentence. She was prosecuted for the same offence in 1878, dying in prison two years later. At trial, she was depicted as an evil force, preying on the gullible. Some suspected she was also involved in an abortionist racket. Her harsh sentences reveal both racial prejudice (she was Jewish) and male opposition to successful businesswomen able to rise above their class at a time when the ideal woman was supposed to be in the home. The publicity surrounding her trials helped to give cosmetics a bad name. ‘Beautiful for ever’ became a Victorian tag line for false praise and blatant artificiality that disguised the truth. The successful music-hall performer and songwriter Arthur Lloyd even turned the Leverson case into a ditty, ‘Mrs Mary Plucker Sparrowtail, or Beautiful for Ever’. It was an enormous hit, making female vanity and cosmetics an even greater topic of derision.
Body size is another area of discrimination and fat-shaming is by no means a recent phenomenon. In the past, elite women who happened to be unusually heavy were easy targets of satirical prints and private gossip. Albinia Hobart, made Countess of Buckinghamshire in 1793, grew increasingly fat with successive pregnancies. Her size was taken to be a sign of aristocratic luxury. Together with her gambling habit, it made her an object of ridicule, especially after the French Revolution, when many feared that the degenerate habits of the rich threatened social order. Some of the prints targeting her carried heavy sexual innuendo, suggesting that her size was a bar to sexual relations. At the time,
fat girls had difficulty finding husbands on the marriage market, as prospective in-laws feared that their bulk might make them infertile. This was true of the eldest sister of Louis XVI, nicknamed GrosMadame. She had a pleasant enough face, but ‘features . . . drowned in fat’.3 She did eventually marry but remained childless, though subjected to the distressing infertility treatments of the age.
Ideals of female beauty are built around constructed racist as well as sexist boundaries. The concept of ‘whiteness’ is a social construct. White skin was early used as a marker to differentiate the rich from peasants forced to labour outdoors. In the colonial period it became racialised and was called into play to help maintain and justify cruel and
oppressive power relations among different peoples. This study shows the growth of the concept of whiteness and racialised beauty. It extends to issues related to the health and beauty of Black and Asian women, but the complex area of the sexual objectification of Black women’s bodies falls mostly outside its remit.
That said, it is impossible to pass over the outrageous exhibition of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa. Also known as Sara or Saartjie (the Afrikaans diminutive of Sarah), she was brought to Europe in 1810 and exhibited in freak shows in Britain and France. Derisively marketed as ‘The Hottentot Venus’, her protuberant buttocks were exposed to view for the titillation of male visitors and to satisfy lurid curiosity. After her death, in 1815, Baartman’s dismembered and dissected body was kept in Paris until her remains were returned to South Africa for burial in 2002. Plaster casts of her body parts were used to help calibrate socially constructed differences between white and Black female beauty. Scrutinised according to Eurocentric tenets of scientific racism, her statistics were used to bolster arguments for white supremacy. She was held to be a naturally inferior example of humanity, from which Western biological advancement could be measured. Scientific racism has been totally discredited but it long influenced attitudes towards Black women, fostering myths such as the notion that they can better tolerate pain.
Baartman’s story, now widely known, has assumed cultural significance as the epitome of both colonial exploitation and the fetishisation of the Black female body. She has become an icon to women who have experienced discrimination. The rumour in 2016 that Beyoncé was about to finance and star in a film based on Baartman’s story prompted outrage. Beyoncé was denounced as lacking in basic human dignity and accused of further exploiting Baartman in order to reinvent herself as a serious writer and actor.4
Baartman’s tours were well publicised. The mockery prompted by her distinctive contours may have partly mirrored the policing of white women’s bodies. As early as 1786 there was a print in circulation among
elite circles of a naked white woman with gigantic breasts and huge buttocks. Entitled A Modern Venus, or a Lady of the Present Fashion in the state of nature, it was based on a drawing of 1785 made by the artist Mary Hoare, who had been trained by her father, William, a portraitist in Bath. The drawing seems to have been made for the amusement of female friends; it mocked the fashions of the time. But the writer and collector Horace Walpole at once saw its commercial potential and had it printed. The resemblance between this satirical image and later prints of Baartman is marked.
Representations of Black beauty long remained elusive. In 1800, Britain had a population of about 10.5 million, of which some 10,000 were Black according to historians, although contemporary reports put the figure at around 20,000.5 But white people rarely encountered Black people outside ports and industrial towns, and in the paintings of white artists, Black figures were seldom the central focus; wealthy visitors to galleries and studios in Britain and Europe were thus able to disregard their presence in works of art. Few white scholars and artists admitted that ideals of feminine beauty were culturally relative.6 From the later nineteenth century on, attempts to foster imperial pride in Britain had the effect of increasing condescension towards colonial peoples. This was evident in myriad forms of popular culture. For example, world festivals were organised for the British public which presented Africans as curiosities in mocked-up villages. In 1895, around eighty Somalians were displayed at Crystal Palace in traditional dress.
Dismissive representations of Black people, and educational projects involving demeaning human displays, helped to promote an ideology of racism. Favourable publicity surrounding key Black figures did little to counteract negative views. Queen Victoria’s goddaughter Sara Forbes Bonetta, a princess of the Egbado clan of the Yorubas in West Africa, was much admired for her beauty and intelligence, and there were popular Black entertainers such as Elisabeth Welch. But Black looks were consistently undervalued, which helped to feed racial prejudice.
2. A satire on the body shape needed to suit the extravagant fashions of 1780s Britain.
Recently, the lack of representations of Black beauty in galleries has been addressed by such artists as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Her enigmatic portraits of fictitious women of colour are appropriately timeless, with minimal background detail assigning them to a particular period. But the ideology attached to the concept of whiteness still enables systemic racism today, feeding on racial oppression and contributing to it. In many social contexts where white people are in the majority, whiteness is so normalised as to be rendered invisible, and the notion of white privilege is hotly disputed. As this book shows, beauty standards are rooted in various forms of oppression.
ASPIRING TO BEAUTY
Women, heavily judged on their looks, may aspire to beauty for the status and opportunities it brings. On this front they are open to manipulation. An infamous example dates from around 1800 when the fashionable concept of white beauty mimicked the fatal symptoms of tuberculosis. Frail women were suddenly in vogue. Among the upper classes, thinness, a pallor that accentuated blue veins, sparkling eyes, and flushed cheeks (really all signs of a constant slight fever) were admired as the height of ‘hectic beauty’. Healthy women endured selfdeprivation to achieve the ghostly but feverish look.
Young girls were often prepared to withstand torments as martyrs to beauty. In southern Ireland in the 1780s, Dorothea Herbert and her friends evolved an elaborate routine to obtain pale skin and willowy frames. They went to bed wrapped up like greasy pomatum sticks in paper, ‘Our Hands, Faces, and Chests were compleatly cover’d with Tallow and Brown Paper, made into various sorts of Ointments – Our Arms were Suspended in the Air by strong Ropes fastend to the Tester of the Bed – Our feet tied to the Valance to stretch our Legs and Make us grow tall.’7 Sleep was difficult. When summer came, they wore thick linen veils to preserve the milky complexion achieved with such sacrifice.
It was commonly understood that pain was necessary to achieve beauty. Some Victorian women put up with daily discomfort to produce the fantastic bodily contours dictated by fashion. The moral expectations of women of the time, especially middle-class women, also involved restraint. Domestic handbooks preached selflessness, charity, and self-discipline. This mental rigour coloured women’s domestic management. With the growing appreciation of the importance of hygiene, it became a woman’s responsibility to maintain standards of domestic cleanliness. It was also her duty to preserve her youth and neat appearance. Some women appreciated that such standards afforded them a leadership role. Susan Cocroft, author of The Duty of Beauty
(1915), advised that it was women’s privilege to cultivate a beautiful body and charming manners, ‘because they educate, refine and uplift. Thus they are most potent agencies in usefulness; they “allure to brighter worlds and lead the way”.’8 From this viewpoint, the cultivation of beauty was not vanity but a noble route to uplifting the world and redeeming it from sordidness and gloom. Often the outcome was that women internalised subtle forms of control which then took on the character of benign self-discipline.
Some, like Madame Rachel, found opportunities to make a good living from the burgeoning beauty industry, and so became implicated in the commercial exploitation of female hopes and fears related to appearance. Commercial pressures intensified existing constraints related to class, race, moral convention, and sexuality. Today, women are bombarded with images of how they should look. In an imageconscious, consumer culture, women’s bodies are increasingly commodified. Even when this development is laid bare, it is still hard to buck the trend. Women who do not ‘beautify’ themselves, or who choose to follow non-standard views of beauty, are judged accordingly.
Even so, women are not passive victims of oppressive male standards of beauty. They help to develop those standards through creative innovation and by expressing stylistic preferences. And this has always been the case, despite opposition. In 1930, one female columnist complained that women had only to wear a little waistcoat or shirt blouse for observers to complain that they were becoming totally unsexed and indistinguishable from men. Yet even she underestimated women’s determination to innovate and dress as they pleased. She wrongly predicted that women of the future would never adopt as a fashion item anything so unflattering as trousers.9
Some argue that by engaging with the world of beauty, the cosmetics market, and works on fashion, women collude in their own oppression. But they can be followers of fashion and creative agents at the same time. This book shows that for centuries women’s experiences have been framed by beauty culture, by bodily practices, and by the cultural
meaning inherent in such rituals. Yet these same practices have also helped them to create and re-create individual identities. Rapid selfreinvention can be a source of pleasure. As early as 1890, one woman reviewed all the arguments for and against using cosmetics, and concluded, ‘After all is said and done every woman will simply do as she likes – if she likes to powder she will do so, if she does not, mayhap she will leave it alone!’10
In the last thirty years, there has been a new medium for the discussion of beauty: the Internet, offering instant publication worldwide. It favours images, concise text, and topicality to foster immediate engagement. It enables self-publication and encourages apparently straightshooting health and beauty directives such as ‘Make this year your best running year yet!’ At the same time, it offers an outlet that magnifies trivial anxieties: ‘Does sitting make your butt flat?’, ‘Are you worried about runner’s face?’ Online content is larded with advertisements, and marketing ploys are often concealed, meaning that women must be ever more adept at evading forces that seek to exert power and control. On the plus side, social media is an unrivalled platform for passing on beauty tips and explaining how to achieve certain styles. Black people credit it with helping to advance the natural hair movement among young people, so that Afro hair is increasingly worn in traditional styles, although the trend is decades old. Young women who create content for these platforms build enormous influence online, perhaps at the expense of their privacy.
Beauty culture remains deeply controversial. This book shows how the obsession for perfection can dominate women’s lives. It illustrates the making of modern women – not just the external aspects of how they presented themselves and were perceived, but also how they felt about the process of preparing themselves to be looked at, and the pressures such scrutiny placed on them. It explores women’s lived experience, their resilience, and their creativity in finding opportunities within the social constraints placed on them. We are increasingly aware that physical health and beauty relate to mental health and wellbeing.