Pain and Power: Beauty Standards and Women’s Health in the American South, 1870–1930

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, reformers, conservatives, rights activists, white supremacists, Black communities, physicians, and their patients all fought for control over dominant public narratives—including how to define what makes a woman beautiful. But despite these powerful social groups fighting for beauty’s power, women themselves took control of personal beauty in their own ways. Women could join the world of beauty as consumers and business owners, but also as independent decision makers who made conscious and unconscious concessions to their own health. The Jim Crow South, dictated by a legacy of racism and sexism, and with a complicated relationship with medicine, gives historians a clear window into the ways that discrimination, separation, and physical health have dictated the ways that beauty has developed over time. But also how beauty factors into a larger conversation about decision making and medical autonomy.