Hope in a Jar Quotes

“When asked how much time she invested in taking care of her body, Edith Enders, married to an abusive husband, scrawled, “not as much as I would were I a free citizen or as I did before I was in bondage to a despot.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“The connections between appearance, identity, and consumption, forged initially by women beauty culturists at the beginning of the century, have inexorably tightened at its end. Moreover, the cosmetics industry has hastened to absorb and profit from the challenges mounted against it, even as it produces the normative ideals of beauty for which it is criticized. If image and style have long offered women a way to express cultural identities, now those identities offer business a new set of images to sell.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“The public debate over cosmetics today veers noisily between the poles of victimization and self-invention, between the prison of beauty and the play of makeup.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“Even movie and romance magazines, whose beauty ads explicitly connected makeup and sex appeal, maintained a logic that downplayed women's sexual assertion: A woman acted upon her desire for a man by making herself beautiful, in order to catch his attention and awaken his desire.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“One became a woman in an act of making up that was, incongruously, inherent to feminine nature.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“However, it was also the mounting discontent among Africn Americans, feminists, and gay activists that challenged the widespread acceptance and commercial exploitation of the governing beauty ideals.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“As they left behind a world of servility and inferiority, consumers adopted beautifying as an essential aspect of becoming modern African-American women. Still, the ideal they favored remained a painfully restrictive one.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“Even when they proclaimed themselves dupes and victims of consumer culture, women did not renounce makeup, for it had become a common language of self expression and self-understanding.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“At the same time, "movie autobiographies" written for the Blumer study suggest that woemn's relationship to the screen was less direct imitation than a negotiation between one's sense of self and the ideal female images.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“To make the mask invisible involved not just creating a natural look, but training the eye to perceive makeup as a natural feature of women's faces.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“[...] ethnicity, defined as style could, like makeup, be easily applied and washed off.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“Indeed, cosmetic ads endlessly reminded women that they were on display, especially conspicuous in a world peopled by spectators and voyeurs: [...] Women were thus urged to transform the spectacle of themselves into self-conscious performances.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“Having challenged an earlier regime of female respectability and moralism, advertisers came to advance what would become key tenets of normative femininity in the twentieth century. Ironically, a period that began with cosmetics signaling women's freedom and individuality ended in binding feminine identity to manufactured beauty, self-portrayal to acts of consumption.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“That hidden demonstrators existed at all, however, is also testimony to the established tradition of beauty culture and to the significance of women's everyday beauty rituals. In employing demonstrators, manufacters acknowledged that the cosmetics business required more than fantasy images of glamour and romance. It required communicating cosmetic information, educating consumers, providing services, and fostering women's sociability.”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

“Product demonstrations, long used within beauty culture, were embraced by mass marketers, not only to sell specific brands but to acclimate women to systematic cosmetics use .”
― Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture