“The Mad Search for Beauty”: Actresses' Testimonials, the Cosmetics Industry, and the “Democratization of Beauty”

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 255-292

  Schweitzer, Marlis ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77951150824     PISSN: 15377814     EISSN: 19433557     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1537781400002656     Document Type: Article

References (211)

1. I would like to thank Elspeth H. Brown, Stephen Johnson, Charlie Keil, Pamela Walker Laird, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Charles McGovern, and Sara Alpern for making insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Alan Lessoff and Kathy Fuller Seeley for making editing suggestions that gready improved the final draft. A small section of this article (now much revised) appeared in Business and Economic History On-line 1.1 (2003) as part of the conference proceedings for the 2003 Business History Conference.
2. Margaret Illington Banes, “The Mad Search for Beauty: And the Slight Chance that the Average Actress Can Guide the Average Woman,” The Green Book Magazine, May 1912, 953.
3. Illington Banes, “The Mad Search for Beauty,” 956.
4. Philip Francis Nowlan, “Warding Off Saturation Point by Changing Advertising Appeal,” Printers'Ink, September 20, 1917, 27–28.
5. see Rob Schorman, Selling Style: Clothing and Social Change at the Turn of the Century (Philadelphia, 2003), esp. 51–57
6. Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington, 1974), 137
7. Barbara Burman, “Made at Home by Clever Fingers: Home Dressmaking in Edwardian England,” The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford, 1999), 35, 49
8. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1999), 61–69.
9. Susan A. Glenn and M. Alison Kibler offer compelling arguments to suggest that the turn-of-the-century American theater was an active site of gender struggle between female performers, who wished to advance their careers and explore issues that concerned them as women, and male producers, who wanted to use female spectacle to establish theatrical empires. Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modem Feminism (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)
10. M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, 1999).
11. See also Maria Elena Buszek, “Representing Awarishness’: Burlesque, Feminist Transgression, and the Nineteenth-Century Pin-up,” The Drama Review 43 (winter 1999): 141–161
12. Leslie Goddard, ‘“Women Know Her to Be a Real Woman’: Femininity, Nationalism, and the Suffrage Activism of Lillian Russell,” Theatre History Studies 22 (June 2002): 137–154.
13. For more on American actresses in the nineteenth and early twentieth century see Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre, 1890–1920 (New York, 1984)
14. Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia, 1984)
15. Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences 1790–1870 (New York, 1990).
16. Contemporary fashion scholarship has identified the ways that fashion products like cosmetics act as tools for self-creation and self-transformation, arguing that they enable women to experiment with gender identity and “try on” new looks and behavior. It is therefore striking to observe the degree to which cosmetic advertisements from the 1910s promote cosmetics as aids to a woman's pre-existing beauty/body. See Kathy Peiss, Hope in a jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York, 1998)
17. Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis, 2000)
18. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick, 1985)
19. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian through the Jazz Era (New York, 1985)
20. Fred Davis, Fashion Culture, and Identity (Chicago, 1992)
21. Joanne Entwisde, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Oxford, 2000).
22. Whereas advertisements for makeup and other beauty products in the 1930s emphasized a star's glamorous “makeover” from small town girl to screen siren, early cosmetics advertisements purposefully obscured the construction of the actress's beauty, suggesting instead that cosmetics merely enhanced her natural appearance. Although some early advertisements allude to the possibility of transformation, it is my contention that most companies were wary of promoting “makeover” transformations. For more on the Hollywood “makeover” in the 1930s see Berry, Screen Style, 94–141
23. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 146–151.
24. On “cartomania” and theater photography in the late nineteenth century, see Alan Thomas, “Players and Beauties” in The Expanding Eye: Photography and the Nineteenth Century Mind (London, 1978): 99–116
25. Ben L. Bassham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony (Kent, Ohio, 1982)
26. William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography (Gettysburg, Penn., 1981)
27. Barbara McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity” in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Martha Sandweiss (New York, 1991): 49–75
28. Laurence Senelick, “Eroticism in Early Theatrical Photography,” Theatre History Studies 11 (1991): 1–49
29. Buszek, “Representing ‘Awarishness,’” 141–161.
30. Tim Shakleton, Introduction, Bubbles: Early Advertising Art from A. E Pears Ltd., ed. Mike Dempsey, (London, 1978), 3.
31. Lois Rather, Two Lilies in America: Lillian Russell and Lily Langtry (Oakland, Calif., 1973), 50. Langtry later explained that she had named this price because it matched her weight at the time
32. other accounts suggest that she did not receive any payment for her endorsement. See Shakleton, “Introduction,” hubbies, 3.
33. New York photographer Napoleon Sarony reportedly paid Langtry $5,000 for a single sitting. McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity,” 67.
34. In 1884 Langtry's endorsement of Pears' was the subject of a parody in Punch magazine that almost became as famous as the original. See Dempsey, Bubbles, 48.
35. For more on the use of actresses in the Pears' campaign see Sherry J. Caldwell, “Clean and Sober: Women Celebrity Endorsers and the 1883 Pears' Soap Campaign,” Theatre Symposium: Representations of Gender on the Nineteenth-Century American Stage 10 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2002): 100–113.
36. Rather, Two Lilies in America, 50.
37. Kathy Peiss uses the term “makeup” to refer to products such as rouge and tinted face powder that could dramatically alter appearance. “Invisible” cosmetics like cold cream were less threatening than “makeup.” See Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 26–31, 53, 56.
38. For more on the association between actresses and prostitutes see Claudia D. Johnson, “That Guilty Third Tier,” in Victorian America, eds. Geoffrey Blodgett and Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia, 1976), 111–120
39. Johnson, “Enter the Harlot,” in American Actress: Perspective on the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1984), 3–36
40. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 9–26
41. Katie N. Johnson, “Zaza: That ‘Obtruding Harlot’ of die Stage,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 223–243.
42. On associations between nineteenth-century (British) actresses and pornography, see Tracy C. Davis, “The Actress in Victorian Pornography,” Theatre Journal 41 (October 1989): 294–315.
43. Auster, Actresses and Suffragists, 18.
44. “See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York, 1978), 224–250.
45. Welter's seminal essay influenced an entire generation of historians but has been criticized for its narrow focus on white, northern, middle-class women. In 2002 a series of articles in the Journal of Women's History reexamined Welter's essay and concluded that despite its flaws, it continued to provide “a point of departure” for ongoing research into nineteenth-century gender ideologies. See journal of Women's History 14 (spring 2002).
46. Elizabeth Reitz-Mullenix uses the concept of True Womanhood to offer a persuasive analysis of American middle-class anxiety towards the nineteenth century actress, die archetypal “false” woman. Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, ‘“So Unfemininely Masculine’: Discourse, True/False Womanhood, and the American Career of Fanny Kemble,” Theatre Survey 40 (November 1999): 105–122.
47. Mullenix, ‘“So Unfemininely Masculine,’” 30.
48. For critical reassessments of “separate spheres” ideology, see Christine Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850–1860,” Feminist Studies 8 (summer 1982): 310–335
49. Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York: 1789–1860 (1982; Chicago, 1987)
50. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Oxford, 1990); eds. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M Reverby, Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women's History (Ithaca, 1992).
51. For a discussion of gender roles within the context of the mid-nineteenth-century culture of sensibility see Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America (New Haven, 1982).
52. Mullenix, ‘“So Unfemininely Masculine,’” 28, 30.
53. Johnson, American Actress, 28–33.
54. Johnson, American Actress, 30–33.
55. Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Fainted Women, 40, 57.
56. Mary Louise Roberts offers an insightful discussion of the actress's questionable status in early-twentieth-century France, as part of a larger analysis of the New Woman. See Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 2002), esp. 54–57.
57. On actresses and antifheatricalism, see Jonas Barish, The Antitbeatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981), 2, 88, 282–89, 466.
58. For an in-depth discussion of nineteenth-century attitudes towards cosmetics see Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, esp. 56–91
59. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 9–60.
60. Printers'Ink: A journal for Advertisers—Fifty Years, 1888–1938, July 28, 1938, 111. During the late 1880s and 1890s, chromolithographed images of actresses appeared on mass-produced trade cards used to advertise everything from booksellers, plumbers, wigmakers, and grocers to tea, soap, patterns, boots, shoes, and patent medicines; although these trade cards were not testimonials in the truest sense of the word, the actress's image nevertheless served as an implicit endorsement of the product.
61. See Folder 6, Box 2, “Dentistry”; Folder 8, Box 1, “Chewing Gum”; Folder labeled “Advertising Cards,” Box 15, “Theater,” Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution [hereafter NMAH]. For more on trade card advertising see Robert Jay, The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America (Columbia, S.C., 1987).
62. Irwin Leslie Gordon, ed., Who Was Who: 5000 B.C. to Date: Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be, as included by Jone Johnson Lewis on “Women's History —Humorous Biographies,” .
63. “Patti, Adelina,” Box 12, Theater, Warshaw, NMAH.
64. To my knowledge, very little has been written about these scandals, although there seems to be a tacit assumption among advertising historians that they occurred. While I have not come across any primary documentation to explain what sparked the scandals, the Printers' Ink collection refers to them several times and advertising historian Stephen Fox alludes to the testimonial's “lingering unsavory association with patent medicines.” See Printer's Ink, A Journal for Advertisers—Fifty Years, 1888–1938, July 28, 1938, 111, 370
65. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York, 1984), 88.
66. In my survey of popular magazines from the late 1890s and early 1900s, Sozodont and Vin Mariani seem to be the most prominent users of testimonial advertisements, although other companies continued to use testimonials in other advertising mediums (i.e. newspapers and trade cards). “I consider Sozodont a peerless dentifrice,” [ad] The Ladies' Home Journal [hereafter LHJ] (April 1898), 27
67. “Vin Mariani,” [ad] The Theatre 1 (August 1901), inside cover.
68. “Theater,” “Actresses,” Box 14, Warshaw, NMAH.
69. Printers'Ink A Journal for Advertisers—Fifty Years, 1888–1938, July 28, 1938, 118.
70. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 89–90.
71. For more on the professionalization of the advertising industry, see Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, 1998), esp. chs. 5–7
72. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (Washington, 1989), esp. chs. 4–5.
73. For more on the history of advertising, see Fox, The Mirror Makers, Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (New York, 1984)
74. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, 1985)
75. Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990).
76. Charles W. Hurd, “Different Uses of the Testimonial,” Printers'Ink, August 28, 1913, 40. I wish to thank Charles McGovern for first pointing out this interesting connection between trade characters and testimonials.
77. R.F.R. Huntsman and B.D. Walthouser, “Are Pretty Women Pictures Good Advertising?” Printers' Ink, August 11, 1909, 8
78. William G. Colgate, “‘Pretty’ Pictures in Copy Becoming Passe,” Printers' Ink, September 15, 1910, 62–66
79. L.B. Jones, “The Photograph in Display Advertising,” Printers' Ink, May 4, 1910, 3–7.
80. For more on the debate between photography and illustration see Elspeth H. Brown, “Rationalizing Consumption: Lejaren à Hiller, and the Origins of American Advertising Photography, 1913–1924,” Enterprise & Society 1 (December 2000): 715–738.
81. James W. Egbert, “What Makes a Good Testimonial: A Discussion of the Kinds of People Whose Names are Worth Having as Endorsements,” Printers' Ink, October 12, 1911, 44, 46
82. Hurd, “Different Uses of the Testimonial,” 34.
83. For more on the rise of the actor and actress in the late nineteenth century, see McArthur, Actors and American Culture.
84. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 38.
85. Elsie de Wolfe, vol. 161, p. 20–1, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts [hereafter RLC, BRTC]
86. Anna Held, vol. 264, p. 112, RLC, BRTC.
87. “Gowns Seen on the Stage,” Harper's Bazar, July 1913, 53–54
88. [Ad for LHJ] The Delineator, Nov. 1913, 72.
89. Alice Brady, “This Business of Dressing: Should You “Wrap You Clothes Around You’ or Should You Put Them On?” The Green Book Magazine (September 1915): 484–490.
90. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986), 6.
91. The hesitancy expressed by several advertising agents about using actresses as endorsers suggests that while attitudes towards actors and actresses had shifted dramatically from the 1890s, some conservative middle-class men and women remained skeptical about the morality of the stage. James W. Egbert, “What Makes a Good Testimonial,” 44
92. “Pianists' Endorsements,” Printers' Ink, November 27, 1911, 30
93. Lynn G. Wright, “Giving References for Your Product,” Printers' Ink, April 20, 1911, 9–10
94. Egbert, “Making the Testimonial Worth More,” Printers'Ink, November 23, 1911, 76.
95. Egbert, “What Makes a Good Testimonial,” 44
96. Nowlan, “Warding Off Saturation Point,” 27–28.
97. Photographs of these lesser players did, however, continued to appear on cigarette cards and other advertisements targeted at men. “Chewing Gum,” Box, 1, Folder 8
98. “Theater,” Box 15, advertising cards, Warshaw, NMAH.
99. In 1916, ads for Pond's Vanishing Cream also began to feature film stars, including Marion Davies and Norma Talmadge, although stage performers continued to be the most prominent endorsers. On Mary Pickford and other Hollywood actresses, see Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 126; “Free! Write for samples of these two creams today,” American Memory Project, Library of Congress, ; “Why every normal skin needs two creams,” Advertising Ephemera Collection, Emergence of Advertising On-Line Project, American Memory Project, Library of Congress, .
100. On early cinema audiences see Barbara Wilinsky, “Flirting with Kathlyn: Creating the Mass Audience,” Hollywood Goes Shopping, 38
101. Robert Sklar, Movie Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (London, 1975)
102. Peiss, Cheap Amusements
103. Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, 1997)
104. Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, 1998)
105. Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton, 2000).
106. On the development of the Hollywood star system see Richard deCordova, “The Emergence of the Star System in America,” Wide Angle 6 (1985): 10–11
107. deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana, 1990).
108. Fuller, At the Picture Show, esp. chs. 7 and 8
109. Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner, “Fashion Fillers in Silent Film Periodicals,” Performing Arts Resources: Performances in Periodicals 14 (New York, 1989): 127–143
110. Stamp, Movie Struck Girls, 10–40.
111. On Hollywood actresses endorsing beauty products in the 1930s, see Berry, “Hollywood Exoticism” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, 113.
112. For more on Mary Pickford's career and rise to stardom, see Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (Toronto, 1997)
113. Scot Eyman, Mary Pickford: America's Sweetheart (NewYork, 1990).
114. Stanley Resor, quoted in Fox, The Mirror Makers, 90.
115. See also Stanley Resor, “Personalities and the Public: Some Aspects of Testimonial Advertising,” News Bulletin no. 138 (April 1929): 1–7
116. “Company Meeting on ‘Personality Advertising’, April 5, 1928; Box 4, Testimonial Advertising 1928–1977, J. Walter Thompson Information Center Records, JWT Collection, John W Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, & Marketing History, Duke University [hereafter Hartman Center].
117. William M. Freeman, The Big Name, (New York, 1957), 183.
118. Neil M. Alperstein, “Imaginary Relationships with Celebrities Appearing in Television Commercials,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (winter 1991), 49.
119. Alperstein, “Imaginary Relationships,” 55.
120. Alperstein, “Imaginary Relationships,” 55, 44.
121. Alperstein's interpretation of spectators' relationships with celebrities draws upon the work of Schudson, Advertising: the Uneasy Persuasion
122. J. Reeves, “Television Stars: The Case of Mr. T,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. H. Newcomb (New York, 1987), 445–454.
123. Alperstein, “Imaginary Relationships,” 50.
124. After 1900, Rigaud, along with fellow Parisian perfumers Coty and Bourjois, hired a New York agent to help the company move into the American market and develop American subsidiaries. These companies played up their association with Parisian fashion and elegance to reach an upper-middle-class clientele. See Peiss, Hope in a jar, 98.
125. Laurence W Griswold, “Value of a ‘Star's’ Name in Sales Plan,” Printers' Ink, January 22,1914,144.
126. This display, which included lights and curtains run by electricity, cost several hundred dollars to stage and only lasted a few weeks because it could not be easily transported to the other cities where Elliott was appearing. Charles W. Hurd, “Putting the Dramatic Punch into Window Display,” Printers' Ink, December 16, 1915, 60.
127. Griswold, “Value of a ‘Star's’ Name,” 143, 146. Griswold cites other examples of products named after celebrities including Billie Burke Chocolates and the Julia Marlowe Shoe.
128. Evidence also suggests that performers were occasionally compelled to endorse products as part of a business arrangement between theatrical management and an advertiser. Letter from Charles Daniel to [J.J.] Shubert, February 4, 1914, Shubert Archives, New York.
129. Griswold, “Value of a ‘Star's’ Name,” 143.
130. “Patent on a Name,” Printers' Ink, February 6, 1908, 8.
131. McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 150–153
132. Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. Paul Conkin and John Higham (Baltimore, 1979), 206–209.
133. Banes, “The Mad Search for Beauty,” 956.
134. Diana Forbes-Robertson, My Aunt Maxine: The Story of Maxim Elliott (New York, 1964), 181.
135. Film actresses could be just as exacting. In 1916, “America's sweetheart” Mary Pickford received a reported 4,000 requests for permission to publish her photograph for advertising purposes before she finally agreed to allow the Pompeian Manufacturing Company, makers of cold cream and other beauty products, to use her image. Seventy poses were made before she was satisfied with the results and willing to release one photograph to the company. The approved image was reproduced in Pompeian's magazine print advertisements and a 1917 calendar. “Mary Pickford's Picture in the Ads,” Printers' Ink, April 1, 1916, 88.
136. “Lillian Russell's Own Toilet Preparations,”[ad] Vanity Fair, January 1914, 87.
137. “To the Women of America, by Lillian Russell” [ad], Harper's Baszar, April 1915, 69.
138. Parker Morell, Lillian Russell: The Era of Plush (Garden City, N.Y., 1943), 294–296
139. Armond Fields, Lillian Russell: A Biography of “America's Beauty” (Jefferson, N.C., 1999), 190.
140. Griswold, “Value of a ‘Star's’ Name,” 147.
141. Griswold, “Value of a ‘Star's’ Name,” 147.
142. Wood v, Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, 222 N.Y. 88, 118 N.E. 214 (1917), .
143. “Addirional Note to Wood v. Lug, Lady Duff-Gordon, p. 36,” .
144. See also “Sears-Roebuck's Latest Advertising Coup: Seeks to Wrest Fashion Prestige Away from New York Mail-Order Houses,” Printers'Ink, December 8, 1916, 7.
145. The Costume Library at the NMAH includes a “Portfolio of Lady Duff-Gordon's Original Designs,” for fall and winter 1916–17. Ads for Lucile's line of patterns appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal, Harper's Bazar, and Good Housekeeping between October 1916 and April 1917.
146. “Portfolio of Lady Duff Gordon's Original Designs,” (Sears, Roebuck and Co.), Trade Books, 1915–1918, Costume Library, NMAH
147. “Lady Duff Gordon's ‘My Dream Girl Frock, [ad]’” LHJ, November 1916,101
148. “Lady Duff-Gordon's Message to the Women of America [ad],” Harper's Bazar, October 1916, 100–101
149. “Three Original New Designs by Lady Duff-Gordon [ad],” Good Housekeeping, March 1917, 90–91.
150. Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon.
151. In 1927 film actress Constance Talmadge appeared in testimonial advertisements for eight different products, ranging from alarm clocks to inner tubes, in a single issue of Liberty magazine. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 115
152. Printer's Ink, A Journal for Advertisers—Fifty Years, 1888–1938, July 28, 1938,370.
153. The list of cosmetics companies includes Lablache Face Powder, Sutol, Sempre Giovine, Lora S. Gilman, Créme Nerol, Mme. Le Claire, Watkin's Mulsified Cocoanut Oil, Rigaud, Helena Rubinstein, The Importers Company, El Rado Dipilatory Cream, Swift & Co. (Maxine Elliott Toilet Soap), Julian Eltinge Cold Cream, Lillian Russell's Own Toilet Preparations, Peg o’ My Heart Perfume, Pond's Vanishing Cream, and Cutex. Ads for the companies listed above appeared in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazar, The Theatre Magazine, The Delineator, and LHJ between 1911 and 1918.
154. Throughout the early twentieth century, many men and women nevertheless continued to promote the notion that physical beauty was an indication of a pure and honest soul. In 1908 Sara A. Hubbard published The Duty of Being Beautiful, in which she encouraged readers to find the inner beauty in one another. See Hubbard, The Duty of Being Beautiful (Chicago, 1908).
155. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 59.
156. For a discussion of the “democratization of beauty” as part of the twentieth-century “beauty myth,” see Dawn H. Currie, Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers (Toronto, 1999), 30–36.
157. For an analysis of the cosmetics industry's deployment of “the democratization of beauty” in the 1930s, see Berry, Screen Style, 94–141.
158. For more on the “democratization of desire” in department stores, see William Leach, hand of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993).
159. Annette Kellerman, Physical Beauty: How to Keep It (New York, 1918), 16.
160. Anna Held, ‘“Make-up’-on the Street and on the Stage: Hints for the Woman at Her Dressing-Table,” The Green Book Magazine (February 1916), 331.
161. Anne Archbald, “A Plea for Make-up (No. 1),” The Theatre Magazine, April 1917, 238.
162. The actresses' emphasis on the importance of self-improvement is consistent with the emergence of what T.J. Jackson Lears calls the “therapeutic ethos” at the turn of die century. See Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1981)
163. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1810–1930.”
164. Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed. T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox, (New York, 1983), 3–38.
165. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 53, 56.
166. As early as 1903, Vogue advised its readers where they could find “undetectable rouges.” This more progressive approach to “making up” reflected the demographic composition of its readership. Vogue's upper-middle-class readers were more likely to experiment with beauty products than the predominandy middle-class readers of The Ladies' Home journal or the Woman's Home Companion. See Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup, From Ancient to Modern Times (London, 1972), 410
167. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 50, 104–05, 123.
168. For more on the history of women's magazines in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century see Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in The Ladies' Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910 (Albany, 1994)
169. Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1895–1914 (New York, 1994)
170. Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate hangings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York, 1995)
171. Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910 (New York, 1996)
172. Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London, 1996).
173. Elsie Janis, “My Campaign for Good Looks,” The Delineator, February 1911, 128.
174. Some actresses may also have felt pressured to accord with the Delineator's own conservative stance towards cosmetics. In fact, in the entire Delineator series, only two women— Billie Burke and Christie MacDonald—offered detailed suggestions for selecting and applying cosmetics. Mary Garden, “My Working Theory of Beauty,” The Delineator, March 1911, 230
175. Maxine Elliott, “Keeping Young and Fresh,” The Delineator, April 1911, 337–338
176. Ellen Terry, “The Woman of Charm,” The Delineator, May 1911, 428
177. Billie Burke, “My Simple Rules for Beauty,” The Delineator, June 1911, 510
178. Christie MacDonald, “Good Complexions,” The Delineator, September 1911,204.
179. Unlike women's magazines, most daily newspapers were more than willing to give their female readers the detailed beauty advice they craved, and while they maintained a generally ambivalent attitude about the morality of cosmetics, they also provided ample opportunity for women to learn about them. See Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 50–51,123.
180. Eleanor Schorer, ‘“Making Up’ With Stage Stars—IV. Laurette Taylor,” the Evening World, March [nd], 1913, Laurette Taylor, vol. 451, 86, RLC, BRTC.
181. Eleanor Schorer, ‘“Making Up’ With Stage Stars—VII. Jane Cowl,” the Evening World April 28,1913.
182. Jane Cowl, vol. 131, p. 99, RLC, BRTC.
183. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 55.
184. Other magazines and newspapers soon introduced their own versions of these articles. For example, in 1916 Motion Picture introduced a beauty column just as film actresses started to make testimonial appearances in cosmetics advertisements. See Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 124
185. Cohen-Stratyner, “Fashion Fillers”
186. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 154–159.
187. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 105.
188. In fact, several female performers, including Billie Burke, Anna Pavlova, Frances Starr, and Maxine Elliott, endorsed more than one beauty product at the same time. These multiple appearances were reminiscent of the testimonial scandals of the 1890s; in most cases, advertisers could do little to stop actresses from doing as they wished. See “The Face Beautiful” [ad for Créme Nerol], Vogue, October 15, 1911, 69
189. “Women Who Have the World at Their Feet Unite in Praise of Valaze” [ad for Helena Rubinstein], Vanity Fair, December 1915, 99
190. “For a Clear Complexion Maxine Elliott Toilet Soap,” [ad] The Theatre Magazine Advertiser, June 1911, vi
191. “Free/Write for samples of these two creams” [ad for Pond's], LHJ, November 1916, 85
192. “Why your skin needs two creams,” Advertising Ephemera Collection, Emergence of Advertising On-Line Project, Hartman Center, .
193. Peiss, Hope in a jar, 105
194. Corson, Fashions in Makeup, 410.
195. In addition to appearing in advertisements for fashion and beauty products throughout the 1910s, actresses also posed as models for leading fashion magazines including Vogue and Harper's Bazar, often in special sections devoted to stage fashions.
196. Edna Woolman Chase and Ilka Chase, Always in Vogue (New York, 1954), 132.
197. For more on fashion photography in this period see Nancy Hall-Duncan, The History of Fashion Photography (New York, 1979), 14, 32, 40
198. F.J. Widener, “Clothing Truths and Fashion Plate Fictions,” Printers' Ink, December 8, 1910,54.
199. “The Face Beautiful and Creme Nerol,” [ad] Vogue (15 Oct. 1911): 69.The Créme Nerol campaign ran for several years (at least until 1918) in the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair, with the occasional new name appearing among the list of established stars.
200. Like Créme Nerol, most of these campaigns were primarily targeted at society women, as the price of the products (e.g. jars of Helena Rubinstein's Valaze ranged from $1.00 to $6.00) and their appearance in Vogue, Harper's Bazar, and other “class” magazines suggests.
201. Ads for Helena Rubinstein include references to Valaze Complexion Powder and Novena Poudre, and Lillian Russell's Own Toilet Preparations included “My Face Powder” and “My Lip Rouge.” See “Women Who Have the World at Their Feet Unite in Praise of Valaze” [ad for Helena Rubinstein], Vanity Fair, December 1915, 99
202. “Lillian Russell's Own Toilet Preparations,” [ad] The Theatre Magazine Advertiser, January 1914, 55.
203. “Le Secret Gaby Deslys” [ad], The Theatre Magazine Advertiser (June 1912), 6.
204. Peiss, Hope In a jar, 121–122.
205. For example see Peiss, Hope in a jar, 126, 137–40
206. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 88, 90. Jennifer Scanlon offers a detailed account of Helen Resor and other female copywriters who worked for the J. Walter Thompson Company in the early twentieth century, and discusses their involvement in a number of key campaigns, including Pond's and Woodbury's Facial Soap.
207. See Scanlon, “Advertising Women: The J. Walter Thompson Company Women's Editorial Department,” in Inarticulate Longings, 169–198.
208. “Gleaming, soft, smooth skin (1915),” Emergence of Advertising On-line Project, .
209. “What a man looks for in a Girl (1916),” Emergence of Advertising On-line Project, .
210. “The charm every actress knows,” [ad for Pond's Vanishing Cream] LHJ, April 1916, 64.
211. Anna Held, “‘Make-up’—on the Street and on the Stage,” 133.