Importing "beauty culture" into Iran in the 1920s and 1930s: Mass marketing individualism in an age of anti-imperialist sacrifice

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 79-95

  Amin, Camron Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE;

EID: 15244353071     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-24-1-81     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. For a reproduction of this anonymous article, replete with images of American and European starlets, see Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy and Popular Culture, 1865-1946 (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2003), 209.
2. The best concise overview of this event is Houshang Chehhabi, "The Banning of the Veil and Its Consequences," in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society Under Reza Shah, 1921-1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2003), 193-210.
3. Here, two American deaths may serve as examples. How ard Baskerville died fighting with pro-Constitutionalist forces near Tabriz during Iran's Civil War in 1909. In contrast, American consul (and anti-bolshevik, spy adventurer) Robert W. Imbrie was killed by an angry mob in 1924 when he made the mistake of photographing a religious procession near a shrine in the midst of anti-Baha'i frenzy sponsored by the Iranian government to curry favor with religious conservatives. See Michael P. Zirinsky, "Blood, Power, and Hypocrisy: The Murder of Robert Imbrie and American Relations With Iran, 1924," International Journal of Middle East Studies 18 (1987): 275-92,
4. and http://www.iranian.com/History/Aug98/Baskerville/index.html (19 July 2004).
5. Indeed, the collapse of the Shah forced American policy makers to reckon not only with the Islamic revivalism in Middle Eastern politics, but with the question of how, despite all the connections between America and Iran, American policy makers were so surprised by events in Iran in 1979. The answer, in a textbook case of Foucaultian irony, is that, in part, American commercial appetites and focus on leftist threats to Iran's "stability" blinded analysts and journalists alike to the realities of the political situation in Iran. See William A. Douram and Mansour Farhang, The U. S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (Berkeley: The University of Californian Press, 1987) and
6. James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of Iranian-American Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
7. Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman.
8. Parvin Paider argues for the existence of a "patriarchal consensus" among these various groups which circumscribed women's progress on a variety of fronts. See Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
9. See Richard Corson, Fashions and Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times (London: Peter Owen, 1972). For a full discussion of traditional Iranian cosmetology through the nineteenth century,
10. see Fatemeh Soudavar Farmanfarmaian, "Haft Qalam Arayish. Cosmetics in the Iranian World," Iranian Studies 33: 3-4 (Summer/ Fall 2000): 285-326.
11. Claudia and Robert Bushman. "The Early History of Cleanliness in America," The Journal of American History 74:4 (March, 1988): 1213-1238 (1224-1226, specifically).
12. Bushman and Bushman, "The Early History of Cleanliness," 1228.
13. Cited in Bushman and Bushman, "The Early History of Cleanliness," 1234.
14. Bushman and Bushman, "The Early History of Cleanliness," 1235.
15. Bushman and Bushman, "The Early History of Cleanliness," 1236.
16. Corson, Fashions and Makeup, 386.
17. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 2nd Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964): 58-5;,
18. cited in Vincent Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in an Age of Advertisement (Ames: University of Iowa, 1992), 10 (Table 1.1). These estimates seem very plausible in the light of other data Vinikas presents regarding circulation by city, subscription, and income distribution.
19. Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell, 15.
20. All values calculated from Table 1.5 in Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell 16. This data would not capture the value of advertising in other ways, but certainly underscores the role of advertising in the periodical press as part of a mass marketing campaign.
21. Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell, 24.
22. Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 95-96.
23. William R. Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," The Journal of American History 71:2 (September 1925): 319-42 (specifically 322-31).
24. Leach, "Transformations," 320.
25. "Namus," here used in an adjectival form, is a very specific form of honor that accrues to men who defend their women /households from the encroachments (sexual or otherwise) of others. The domain of male namus was extended to the nation starting in the nineteenth century. See Afsaneh Najmabadi, "The Erotic Vatan [Homeland] as Beloved and Mother: To Love, to Possess, and to Protect," Comparative Studies in Society and History 39:3 (July 1997): 442-467.
26. cAmel-e Fe sad-e Akhlaq," Parcham-e Eslam, (9 May 1946): 1, 4.
27. See also, "Mod-Parasti," Parcham-e Eslam, (5 June 1946), 1.
28. Nurollah Sotudeh, Etteld'at 2295 (22 September 1934), 2. For the broader discussion of education and morality,
29. see Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 143-65 and 205-14.
30. c at 2273 (23 December 1934): 2.
31. For an expanded quote, see Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 206. For literary expressions of this concern over the state of modern Iranian culture in the 1930's, see Sadeq Hedayat's 1933 collection of satirical short stories Vagh Vagh Sahab and the fiery and semi-autobiographical 1931 novel of journalist Mohammad Mascud, Night Amusements (Tafribat-e Shab). Mascud's novel was hailed as an almost "scientific" expose of social corruption.
32. Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 72-3.
33. In Persian, "khanom-e khaneh va khanom-e birun." The first part of the phrase is easier than the second to translate succinctly. By "lady of the outside," or, "Lady Outside" the meaning here is "the young lady [i.e., the daughter] who prefers to spend her time outside" - to the same effect as "Little Miss 'I Want to go Out"."
34. Salnameh-e Pars [hereafter, SP] 7 (1311-1932-33)-Tehran: Majles Printing House, 1933. Part II: 61. This yearbook was part almanac, part government yearbook, and part magazine. It was published annually by Amir Jahid. It was a very interesting mix of the official, didactic, and commercial aspects of the periodical press in Iran. Claiming a run of 15,000 copies in the 1920s and 20,000 copies by the late 1930s, its author/editor Amir Jahid, made a point of numbering each issue and then entering the number of each issue in a drawing for several cash prizes for a few lucky subscribers. The pre-publication price of each issue was two-thirds the post-publication price. I am indebted to Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi for bringing this publication to my attention and encouraging me to review it for this article. She also shared some of her observations on cosmetic and fashion advertising in 'Alam-e Nesvan above and beyond her own work on the subject in "Expanding Agendas for the 'New' Iranian Woman: Family Law, Work and Unveiling," in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society Under Riza Shah, 1921-1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003): 157-80.
35. For a longer discussion of the effects of commercialism on the Iranian press (especially in political rhetoric), see Camron Michael Amin, "Selling and Saving 'Mother Iran': Gender and the Iranian Press in the 1940s," The International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001): 335-61.
36. The Reminiscences of Parvin Mo'ayyed-Sabeti (1988), pages 3-4, in the Oral History Collection of the Foundation for Iranian Studies. Originally cited in Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 210-11. Sabeti lived in Mashhad with her husband during the Women's Awakening Project. She founded an alumnae society for graduates of the American school for girls in Tehran, the Nurbakhshiyan Society. Nurbakhsh was the name designated for the American school as the Pahlavi state moved to nationalize all private schools in Iran in 1940.
37. Calculated from "Table 1: Volume and Value of Total Visible Imports, 1900-1968," in Julian Bahrier, Economic Development in Iran, 1900-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 104-6. A word of caution here, as Bahrier was not sure of the reliability of trade data before 1960 (estimated error rate of ±thirty per cent) and could not, of course, account for smuggling or false declarations by importers.
38. Bahrier, 48. Everything became much more expensive during the war and after. In the 1960s, the index for food was rising faster than the general index whereas index for clothing trailed the general index.
39. Bahrier, Economic Development in Iran, 108.
40. Amin, "Selling and Saving," 350.
41. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 125-7. On page 126, Peiss notes that Max Factor "company representatives draped the glamorous image of the movies around their products. At movie matinees, they set up stands in theater lobbies, made up women onstage, raffled cosmetic kits, and distributed complexion analysis cards with the name of local drug stores."
42. See U. S. State Department Files 891.6363 Petroleum (reels 14 and 15 of the microfilmed sets) and 891.77 ULEN AND CO (reel 17). One small set of documents refers to efforts by American filmmakers to confront the use of bootleg copies of American films in Iran from 1932-1935, see file 891.544 "Motion Pictures."
43. See Michael P. Zirinsky, "Render Therefore unto Caesar That Which is Caesar's: American Presbyterian Educators and Reza Shah," Iranian Studies, 26:3-4 (1993): 337-56.
44. For more on the history of American financial missions to Iran before the Cold War, see W. Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (New York: The Century Co., 1912) and
45. Arthur Chester Millspaugh, Americans in Persia (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1946). Millspaugh's second tour as a financial advisor to the Iranian government occurred during the Allied Occupation of Iran during World War II and ended in 1944 due to pressure from parliamentary politicians and the press (rather than from the royal court, as happened in 1927).
46. While there is no doubt that the very developed American advertising industry in the 1920's and 1930's sought to influence American consumer choices, Roland Merchand was skeptical that there was a coherent effort to create a "consumer ethic." It would seen reasonable to expect that such a consumer interest in beauty culture in Iran might similarly have been a by-product of the far less organized advertising efforts there. Even Iranian state propaganda efforts in Iran would have been less well financed than American advertising. For more on the emergence of the American consumer ethic, see Advertising the American Dream. Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1985), 117-63.
47. Even new dance crazes would be described as little windows on the secrets of modernity, the practice of "women of America and the civilized countries of Europe" that was part of a regimen to foster "stronger muscles" and "improve the circulation of the blood." See "Amuzesh-e Raqs-e Vales," Mehregan 134 (May 1941): 21.
48. For example, Myna Loy, on the cover of Mehregan 103 (5 January 1940).
49. "Varzesh: Varzesh-e Banovan," Mehregan 113 (14 June 1940): 6.
50. "Honarpishegan-e Ziba, Mahertarin Shenagaran, Mehergan 111 (17 May 1940): 20.
51. "Behdasht va Ziba'i: Tariqeh-e Sahih-e Hamam-e Aftab," Mehregan 96 (22 September 1939): 16.
52. "Arayesh-gah-e Zhan," Mehregan 49 (19 June 1937): 2, and
53. "Mo'ssasseh-e Varzesh va Masazh be Osul-e Su'edi," Mehregan 53 (14 August 1937), facing the Table of Contents.
54. c at, 60 (24 October 1926), 2.
55. c at, 61 (25 October 1926), 2.
56. c at at this time.
57. c at, 273 (29 July 1927), 4.
58. Quoted in Shireen Mahdavi, For God, Mammon and Country: A Nineteenth Century Persian Merchant Haj Muhammad Hassan Amin al-Zarb (1834-1898) (Boulder: Westview, 1999), 168.
59. SP 5 (Tehran: Majles Printing House, 1308 [1929-30]): 24 (of the advertising section).
60. c at, 1935 (2 July 1932), 4.
61. Mehregan, 73 (17 September 1938): back cover.
62. c at 2524, (4 July 1936), 6.
63. Educated women did clerical work outside the government (and perhaps inside unofficially) for years before the Women's Awakening, of course. Women could, and did, take private typing lessons from typewriter sales shops. After the collapse of the regime of Reza Shah in 1941, a press furor erupted over the right of women to stay in the government clerical jobs they had been given during the Women's Awakening.
64. c at, 2546 (29 July 1936), 8.
65. cal and Associates knew of this fact when they ran their ads. REO cars, however, still have their enthusiasts worldwide (and one cannot forget, no matter how hard one tries, the band REO Speedwagon).
66. See http://clubs.hemmings.com/clubsites/reo/, (19 July 2004).
67. c at, 2559 (14 August 1936), 8.
68. c at, 2592 (10 September 1936), 1, 8.
69. For a British diplomat's description of a "Western-style" state dinner with the Pablavis in 1938, see Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 102.
70. Rostam-Kolayi, 172-5.
71. Rostam-Kolayi, 173-4.
72. c at, 2706 (5 February 1936), 1.
73. Ironically, it appears that American advertisers at this time shared with the Pahlavi State (and its later critics) an ethos of helping society to make the transition to modernity. For the advertisers, part of this "therapeutic" role, in addition to providing a way to conceptualize and understand modern life, was informing consumers about new products. Another interesting resonance with the Iranian experience is the conceptualization of the advertisers as male and the public as feminine/emotional. In the case of the Women's Awakening, the patriarchal state certainly saw itself as chaperoning young women to a particular vision of modernity. See Merchand, 32-38 and 335-59.
74. "Pasokhha-ye Mosabeh-e Delkash-e Makhsus-e Aghayan" Mehregan, 83 January-February, 1939): 12-13
75. "Pasokhha-ye Mosabeqeh-e Delkash-e Makhsus-e Aghayan" Mehregan 84 (10 March 1939): 12-13.
76. See also, Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 131-34. I neglected to include this material on men's responses in my book and only noticed it as I was scouring Mehregan for advertisements and articles on fashion and cosmetics. Unlike the women, the men were not directly compared with foreign stereotypes. The potential significance of the questions on ideal appearance had simply not dawned upon me until I began to think about creation of Iran's "consumer culture."
77. Majid Movaqqar, the publisher of Mehregan, was a parliamentary deputy in the 1930s and early 1940s, a time when it was impossible to be elected without the court's approval.
78. This public "focus group" in Mehregan in the 1930s poses many of the same analytical problems and possibilities as the modern focus group utilized by advertisers in the contemporary United States. In both cases, the information solicited and extracted from the group is being utilized by the institution to effect ends it deems valuable. Despite this unequal power relationship, the members of the focus groups have an opportunity to express their preferences on an issue. If only on the narrow issue of "companionate marriage," it might be useful to think of the relationship between Mehregan/State and the respondents /subjects cited in the article as being akin to that of marketers and consumers in Kalman Applbaum's 1998 analysis in which "marketers and consumers are equal partners (whether as partners or adversaries, whether as active or passive) in the process of the re-creation of the capitalist cultural economy... Marketers and consumers, in haggling with each other over the price of culture in late capitalist modernity, share the responsibility for the generation of this capitalist cosmology." Kalman Applbaum, "The Sweetness of Salvation: Consumer Marketing and the Liberal-Bourgeois Theory of Needs," Current Anthropology 39:3 (June 1998): 323-49. What attracted me to this conceptualization was Applbaum's use of the work of Marshall Sahlins as a point of departure, work I have used elsewhere in conceptualizing the Iranian press as a window on Iran's "cultural scheme." Applbaum was also attempting to tread a line between those theorists who imagine marketers spinning a totalizing and controlling hegemonic discourse on consumption in modern societies and those who see the relationship as a matter of negotiation stemming from a conception of society as being made of up rational actors with complete freedom of action. In the case of modern Iran, the issue has been more about the totalizing effects of state policies and propaganda but it strikes me as a similar problem (with the added dimension, in this case, of market forces). Commentators on Applbaum's article take him to task for ignoring the power dynamics inherent in marketer/consumer relations, a lack of empirical rigor, and a failure to integrate ideas of "consumer identity" developed in examination of such processes outside the United States. While I do not quite agree with Applbaum's reply that one can "control for power," I do regard power as a dynamic thing and agree with Deniz Kandiyoti, as she argued in the case of patriarchy specifically, that the true limits of power are established by resistance (be it through rebellion or negotiation) to that power.
79. See Deniz Kandiyoti, "Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective," in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, eds. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven: Yale Universitty Press, 1991), 23-42. For more on the use of testimonials in American advertising at this time, see Merchand, 52-63.
80. c aref beh Shahrestanha, (25 Azar 1314) [No. 3 Ministry of Education Memorandum to the Counties, (17 December 1935)] in Khoshunat va Farhang: Asnad-e Mahramaneh-e Kashf-e Hejiab (1313-1322 [1934-1944]) (Tehran: Entesharat-e Sazman-e Asnad-e Melli-ye Iran, 1371 [1992/3]), 2-4.
81. The full translation of this document will appear in A Sourcebook for Modern Middle Eastern History, ed. Camron Michael Amin, Benjamin C. Fortna, and Elizabeth B. Frierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2004).
82. See Danesh 27 (27 May 1911): 2-3. The letter is translated in full in Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 42-47. American advertisers in the 1920s and 1930s also played on the themes of attracting men and keeping husbands at home even as they pitched to women with wider professional and social lives. Merchand, 167-188.
83. "Arayesh," Zaban-e Zanan [hereafter, ZZ] 23:1 (December 1942): 19. Translating "arayesh" as "cosmetology" imparts a modern significance to the word. Earlier meanings include "ornament" and "adornment" and even "custom." In modern Persian, the term arayeshgah means "beauty salon."
84. See, for example, "Arayesh" and "Hefz-e Khoshgeli," ZZ 24:2 (June 1944): 25-26 and 29,
85. For example, "Arayesh" in ZZ 24:2 was taken from Marie Claire, published initially in France from 1937 until 1942. War interrupted the publication during the time that Dowlatshahi's staff was adapting its content for Zaban-e Zanan. Revived in 1994, Marie Claire is now a Hearst Publication, one of several in its Marie Claire Group, and published in many languages. Its current corporate image is built on a narrative that identified the original Marie Claire published by Jean Prouvost (publisher of Le Figaro and Paris-Match) as "the first magazine aimed at women encouraging them to consider their own autonomy, charm and personal development." See http://magazines.ivillage.com/marieclaire/ about/history/articles/0,13794,434743 441086,00.html (July 19, 2004).
86. SP 16 (1320-1941/2: 103
87. vab-e Lebas," "Parvaresh-e Jesm va Jan," and "Kelid-e Tandorosti," SP 17 (1321-1942/43) Part I: 51-74, 75-95, 110-154.
88. SP 17, 94.
89. SP 17, 110.
90. SP 17, 112.
91. SP 17, 116.
92. SP 17, 119.
93. SP 17, 123.
94. SP 17, 127.
95. Taj Homa, "Tasavi-e Zan va Mard," 'Alam-e Nesvan 9:6 (November 1929): 252-59.
96. Not in the same sense as "flavor of the month," this title might be better translated loosely as "Today's Woman" or "Contemporary Woman."
97. Ziba-Mir Hosseini, "Stretching the Limits: A Feminist Reading of the Shari'a in Post-Khomeini Iran," in Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 287-91.
98. Hosseini, "Stretching the Limits," 292-93.
99. Paidar P. takes note of the defense of women's rights that Zan-e Ruz made, beginning in 1984, under Sherkat's editorship. It appears she had challenged the status quo even before founding Zanan. Paidar, 275-302.
100. "Mosahebeh: Mostafa Mesbahzadeh," Iran Nameh 26:2-3 (1998)]: 331-61. The more unprocessed transcripts from his oral history are available at the Foundation for Iranian Studies in Bethesda, Maryland.
101. The company grew from a drugstore founded by Hans Schwarzkopf in Berlin in 1898. See http://www.hekel.com/int_henkel/schwarzkopf_com/ index.cfm?pageid=162, (19 July 2004).
102. Wella was founded in 1880 by Franz Ströher. See http://us.wella.com/ cp/history/begining.jsp, (19 July 2004).
103. This company was founded in 1911 based on the discovery of cold cream compound by a research team headed by Oskar Troplowitz. See http:// us.wella.com/cp/history/begining.jsp, (19 July 2004).
104. "Mosabeqeh-e Bayn al-Millali Dar Aruba," Zan-e Ruz 538 (11 Mordad 1354 [August 1975]): cover and 17.
105. cani cheh?" Zan-e Ruz 617 (30 Bahman 2535 [February 1976]): 22-23, 81. The article was a complaint against men who told pretty Iranian women to "stop playing Iranian" and to give into their sexual advances like European and American women. Leaving aside the realities behind such perceptions, the sexual availability of Western women is an old occidentalist trope, employed even by such sober feminists as Sadiqeh Dowlatshahi who argued in the 1920s that Iranian men were being wooed away from chaste Iranian women by "second and third class" European women with more sexual experience.
106. Robin Wright, The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 290.
107. E-mails from Maryam Nabavi dated, 15 and 23 August 2003.
108. c at-e Banovan 17:826 (9 May 1973): 18, 91.
109. Also, a researcher on the history of Iranian aviation, Abbas Atrash, who shared the aforementioned article, has doubts about any connection between Mosaddeq and Reza Shah's Aero Club.
110. See his 22 November 2002 article, "Against the Wind," for the webzine The Iranian at http://www.iranian.com/History/2002/ November/Pilots/index.html (19 July 2004).
111. This term was coined by the Ottomans and appeared in Persian as "yengi donya," following Ottoman Turkish spelling. Nineteenth century Iranian newspapers tended to use the French "Etats-Unis" for the United States.