Laila Haidarali
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479875108
- eISBN:
- 9781479865499
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status ...
More
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status in the modern nation. This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms. Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this book analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women’s social history. It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class. By tracing brown’s changing meanings and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty works to unpack a set of intertwined values and judgments, compromises and contradictions, adjustments and resistances, that were fused into social valuations of women.Less
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status in the modern nation. This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms. Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this book analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women’s social history. It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class. By tracing brown’s changing meanings and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty works to unpack a set of intertwined values and judgments, compromises and contradictions, adjustments and resistances, that were fused into social valuations of women.
Laila Haidarali
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479875108
- eISBN:
- 9781479865499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Chapter 1 explores the life of Elise Johnson McDougald, a Harlem educator, essayist, and social investigator. It studies her public and private writings, including a scrapbook she maintained as a ...
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Chapter 1 explores the life of Elise Johnson McDougald, a Harlem educator, essayist, and social investigator. It studies her public and private writings, including a scrapbook she maintained as a record of her accomplishments. As a prominent educator and as a middle-aged woman, McDougald was a figure transitioning between the “woman’s era” and that of the “new woman.” For this and other reasons that emerge in the chapter, this chapter questions why she came to embody the “brown beauty” of the New Negro woman.Less
Chapter 1 explores the life of Elise Johnson McDougald, a Harlem educator, essayist, and social investigator. It studies her public and private writings, including a scrapbook she maintained as a record of her accomplishments. As a prominent educator and as a middle-aged woman, McDougald was a figure transitioning between the “woman’s era” and that of the “new woman.” For this and other reasons that emerge in the chapter, this chapter questions why she came to embody the “brown beauty” of the New Negro woman.
