Cosmetology

Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature--Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life. Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women--and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati's gossip columnists at the time.

". . .This work is an attempt to unsnarl the various meanings of hair in African American culture. When I began to research and write about the politics of African American hair, I was primarily interested in the 1960s and '70s because I believed that what the Afro came to symbolize then was the beginning of the issues and contradiction I wanted to discuss. When I began, I thought I understood where the views and beliefs about hair that my grandmother, mother, and myself held came from, and how hair and the meaning of hair were impacted by political and historical shifts. I knew that as the Civil Rights Movement became the Black Liberation or Black Power Movement in the mid­seventies, wearing an Afro became synonymous with nationalist sentiments within both the African American community and America at large.For example, although some may be unclear about who Angela Davis was and the particulars of why she was incarcerated, we remember her Afro—a halo of natural hair framing her face—and her closed fist raised in the Black Power salute. The Afro was understood to denote black pride, which became synonymous with activism and political consciousness. This sentiment moved sharply against the prevailing integrationist ideology and evidenced a belief that the gains of the Civil Rights Movement were not broad­based enough. . ."

How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a "kitchen physic," as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business?

Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.