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Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop. By Julie A. Willett. (New York: New York University Press, 2000. xii, 249 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8147-9357-6.)
Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business. By Jane R. Plitt. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. xviii, 184 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-8156-0638-9.)
These two books focus on the rise of the beauty shop through dramatically different lenses. Julie A. Willett writes a business and labor history of beauty shops that includes the regulation efforts of high-profile, mostly male, industry leaders and the grass-roots efforts that formed the backbone of the beauty industry: black and white female-owned small shops held in kitchens, parlors, or storefronts. Jane R. Plitt presents a biography of Martha Matilda Harper that credits this early beauty entrepreneur with promoting economic independence for many women by establishing them as owners in her innovative franchise system, thereby helping them achieve the American dream. The two vantage points lead to divergent narratives about the rise of the beauty shop and conflicting impressions about the role of race and class in the industry.
Willett demonstrates that the beauty shop was integral to homosocial women's cultures through the twentieth century, but that these cultures-and the beauty industry-were quite starkly divided by race. The 1920s saw a rapid expansion of the industry for both black and white hairdressers in response to style changes and technological developments. Prior to that time, Willett argues, shops...