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NWSA Journal 13.2 (2001) 196-200



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Book Review

Beauty Matters

Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, & Black Women's Consciousness

Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, & Black Women's Consciousness

The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present


Beauty Matters edited by Peg Zeglin Brand. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 368 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, & Black Women's Consciousness by Ingrid Banks. New York: New York University Press, 2000, 197 pp., $55.00 hardcover.

The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 258 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Women's struggle for identity, unfortunately, often continues to be associated with conditions of beauty. Young girls continue to learn, through reading traditional children's literature such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, that prettiness often leads to success. These stories tout the theme of beauty as the key to happiness, making the prince, and not self-worth, the prize of every girl's quest. Although some current children's literature portrays the princess as a stronger character, such as Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess (1980), the issue of beauty is still a focus.

Beauty Matters, Hair Matters, and The Face of Our Past all address the issue of beauty and its influence on the status of women from the past to the present. Does beauty matter in deciding women's success or failure in life? If so, who decides what beauty is? Beauty Matters and Hair Matters both explore the racial and gender issues associated with beauty as well as consider how the issue of beauty can be a major setback for all women. The Face of Our Past presents a new Cinderella image that crosses racial and cultural boundaries of beauty.

Brand's Beauty Matters is divided into three sections. The first contains perspectives of how beauty has been historically defined by philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and art. The concept of beauty and how it has come to objectify women throughout time is also discussed. The second section provides a wealth of information on how the physical attributes of beauty are used in advertising commercial products. The heart of the book is in this section; the chapters outline how both women and men are dehumanized in the competitive market of advertising. The authors give examples of images that stifle self-worth and growth, discuss images of the male physique in terms of sex appeal, and argue for the rise of homophobia because of these images. The sexual fantasies of women, as well as images that represent the body as grotesque due to fears of aging, illness, disability, or death are also discussed. The final section develops the notion of beauty as art. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? If it is, [End Page 196] how then is art defined? These chapters also look at how women, from the most conservative to the more feminist, define themselves.

Peg Zeglin Brand gives a great rationale for this book in her introduction. Brand's intention is to "bring together art, aesthetics, Cultural Studies, feminist theory and fashion to the table of 'talk' about beauty" (15). She not only discusses the definitions of beauty in a culture, but she also considers how those definitions define cultural expectations of beauty. This allows the reader to see the limitations and honors associated with beauty. The articles flow from one chapter to the next in a seamless whole that reads as if one author wrote it. The historical lens on issues related to beauty provides an informed picture of conditions that still prevail today. The discussion of how the Miss America Pageant limits some races from entering the pageant, because their physical features such as hair type and eye color do not conform to standardized definitions of beauty, is one example. Beauty Matters causes the reader to pause and...

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