“‘Le miracle et le mirage’: Beauty institutes and the making of modern french women”

Abstract

This article examines how, as a centerpiece of France’s commercial beauty culture, the early twentieth-century beauty institute provided the strategies, goods, and professional opportunities required to make French women modern. An industry dedicated to women’s self-care and instrumental in making women visible (creating a look that in turn influenced how women would be seen) in the industrial metropolis, beauty institutes, I argue, provided a uniquely feminine path to modernity. Investigating institutes as both a commercial venture and a cultural enterprise, this article culls the autobiographies and personal letters of female entrepreneurs, the news items and advertisements posted in women’s lifestyle magazines, debates in trade journals, and a variety of beauty, health and hygiene manuals, to uncover women’s extensive involvement in and complex relationship to France’s modern beauty industry. Through these sources, the article considers less how business profited from women’s beauty work to illuminate how beauty work influenced pervasive cultural ideals regarding modern womanhood, thereby enabling French women to produce new social identities in the decades following the Great War.

Keywords:

• Beauty institute
• France
• modern woman
• cosmetics and cosmetic surgery
• great war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Women’s wartime activities influenced some of their postwar civil liberties. Women could join labor unions without a husband’s consent (1920) and they were permitted to take the male version of the baccalauréat exam (1924). However, French women remained disenfranchised, they enjoyed limited reproductive rights (further curtailed by anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive legislation passed in the early 1920s), and, spouses remained legally subject to paternal authority until 1938.

2 Peter Burke explains the ways in which cultural history has infiltrated other areas of inquiry including “intellectual history, social history, political history, the history of science, the history of art, the history of literature, the history of the book, the history of language and the history of religion, together with classics, archaeology.”

3 I have found no archival evidence documenting that “dermatologists throughout the world” tested Rubinstein products; however, Rubinstein herself was known to have diligently tested her products. She studied dermatology in the early 1900s and her labs supported dozens of chemists and researchers who developed hundreds of beauty products, among them the first medicated skin-care treatments.

4 Terminology taken from a Keva Institute Diploma from 1932, supplied to the author by Michael Semler.

5 Dr. Suzanne Noël, La chirurgie esthétique: son rôle social (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1926) cited in Comisky, “Cosmetic Surgery in Paris,” 42. Noël, (née Suzanne Blanche Marguerite Gros in Laon, France in 1878) studied dermatology and was the first female to practice cosmetic surgery in France.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Grout

Holly Grout is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, USA. Her research interests include the cultural history of modern France, women and gender studies, and the history of beauty, fashion, celebrity, and consumer culture. In addition to her first book, The Force of Beauty: Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic (LSU Press, 2015), she has published in French Historical Studies, French Politics, Culture and Society, Aeon, The Journal of Contemporary European History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and The Journal of Women’s History. Her current project, Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France argues that female performers – notably Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker – played a central role in the international development of modern celebrity.