Brown Beauty
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Brown Beauty

Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

Laila Haidarali

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Brown Beauty

Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

Laila Haidarali

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About This Book

Examines how the media influenced ideas of race and beauty among African American women from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a complicated discourse emerged surrounding considerations of appearance of African American women and expressions of race, class, and status. Brown Beauty considers how the media created a beauty ideal for these women, emphasizing different representations and expressions of brown skin. Haidarali contends that the idea of brown as a “respectable shade” was carefully constructed through print and visual media in the interwar era. Throughout this period, brownness of skin came to be idealized as the real, representational, and respectable complexion of African American middle class women. Shades of brown became channels that facilitated discussions of race, class, and gender in a way that would develop lasting cultural effects for an ever-modernizing world. Building on an impressive range of visual and media sources—from newspapers, journals, magazines, and newsletters to commercial advertising—Haidarali locates a complex, and sometimes contradictory, set of cultural values at the core of representations of women, envisioned as “brown-skin.” She explores how brownness affected socially-mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years, showing how the majority of messages on brownness were directed at an aspirant middle-class. By tracing brown’s changing meanings across this period, and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty demonstrates the myriad values and judgments, compromises and contradictions involved in the social evaluation of women. This book is an eye-opening account of the intense dynamics between racial identity and the influence mass media has on what, and who we consider beautiful.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2018
ISBN
9781479838370

1

Brown Beginnings

Imaging the New Negro Woman in 1920s Literary Print Culture

Woman has been the weather-vane, the indicator, showing in which direction the wind of destiny blows. Her status and development have augured now calm and stability, now swift currents of progress. What then is to be said of the Negro woman of to-day, whose problems are of such import to her race?
There is . . . an advantage in focusing upon the women of Harlem—modern city in the world’s metropolis. Here, more than anywhere else, the Negro woman is free from the cruder handicaps of primitive household hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race subjugation. Here, she has considerable opportunity to measure her powers in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city. The questions naturally arise: “What are her difficulties?” and, “How is she solving them?”
To answer these questions, one must have in mind not any one Negro woman, but rather a colorful pageant of individuals, each differently endowed. Like the red and yellow of the tiger-lily, the skin of one is brilliant against the star-lit darkness of a racial sister. From grace to strength, they vary in infinite degree, with traces of the race’s history left in the physical and mental outline on each. With a discerning mind, one catches the multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women, and grasps the fact that their problems cannot be thought of in mass.
—Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood”
In 1925, Elise Johnson McDougald, an African American educator, social investigator, and vocational guidance counselor, reflected on the problems facing the “Negro woman of to-day” in an essay she titled “The Task of Negro Womanhood.”1 The essay was featured that year in the critical anthology The New Negro and showcased the view of African American women on the modern urban landscape of Harlem. McDougald, a native New Yorker, wrote how the city’s more expansive freedoms buoyed the progress of “Negro women” doing so not only “amidst rapid and continuing change” but also by “inculcat[ing] a calm and stability” among them. Addressing the interracial, middle-class, and liberal-minded reading audience of The New Negro, McDougald emphasized their need to grasp the diversity of modern urban women, who by virtue of the anthology’s focus on the “New Negro” was presented to readers as such.
To underline these differences among women, McDougald relied on descriptors of color, light, and tone to trouble the pejorative stereotypes of African American women that circulated widely in modern culture; she coaxed readers: “have in mind not any one Negro woman, but rather a colourful pageant of individuals, each differently endowed.” A complementarity among and between women appeared in McDougald’s foregrounding of diverse skin tones. Color-filled imagery such as “the red and yellow of the tiger-lily” posed a metaphoric comparative to darker tones, and in doing so underlined the diversity among women in positive and egalitarian terms, reasoning that “the skin of one is brilliant against the star-lit darkness of a racial sister.” Regardless of these differences and others, African American women, McDougald argued, shared a considerable burden on the modern urban-scape of Harlem. Though free from “cruder handicaps” and “grosser forms of sex and race subjugation,” Harlem’s women confronted “the less tangible and measurable impediments” and when assessed by dominant white standards, they fared poorly. McDougald explained how “ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts,” crafted a beauty aesthetic that not only “exclude[d] [New Negro women] entirely,” but further rendered invisible the “multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women.”2
Image in the modern metropolis mattered in ways that affected women’s economic, social, and sexual lives. The most acute affront to the progress of New Negro women appeared in the commercialized imagery that moved, with New Yorkers and other modern urbanites, through public space. Representations of “grotesque Aunt Jemimas” abounded in pictorial form; its celebration of the “pitiful black mammy of slavery days” reinforced notions that service and servility were the sole capacities of African American women. Other representations subjected women to further “ridicule” and “mirthless laugh(ter).” McDougald explained how dramatic portrayals engaged in representations of women’s “feminine viciousness or vulgarity,” although she clarified that these behaviors were “not particular to Negroes.” These distorted images no doubt affected the “general attitude of mind” of white Americans, but McDougald underlined even broader concerns: she noted how these misrepresentations worked to justify discriminatory hiring practices, thereby curtailing the already-limited opportunities in industrial work. In pointing to racial discrimination as a systemic feature in modern hiring practices, McDougald argued that these denials traded on stereotypes of women’s bodies, behaviors, and beauty that circulated widely and with broad effect. In “Black Mecca” of Harlem, McDougald found the New Negro woman of the mid-1920s, “struck in the face daily by contempt from the world about her,” as she worked to “maintai[n] her natural beauty and charm and improv[e] her mind and opportunity.”3
McDougald highlighted the need for a new public imaging of African American women, clearly defining the parameters for women’s self-presentation in the urban political economy around beauty, charm, and education. In her essay, these attributes materialize to offset, oppose, and eventually overturn pejorative stereotyping that bound women to a racist past. While not altogether new to the 1920s, this strategy departed from older and longer-standing practices that were also directed at recasting the self-presentation of African American women. The best known of these efforts emanated from organizations geared toward racial uplift and reform. For example, members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), established in 1896, and the Urban League, founded in 1910, engaged in a gendered practice of racial uplift. These moral reformers and clubwomen, drawn from the ranks of elite and middle-class African Americans, set out to reform the presentation, behavior, and public representation of women of lesser socioeconomic means and status. This top-down, reform-based approach emphasized traits of public displays and behaviors to showcase women’s morality, chastity, hygiene, temperance, domesticity, and motherhood; as prescriptions of respectability, this public image was seen to offset crude stereotypes that envisioned all African American women as sexual, servile, and depraved. At the same time, other women developed their own displays of respectability, but as a middle-class ideology and practice, respectability remained linked to collective “race pride and progress.” McDougald’s focus on women’s beauty, charm, and education rather than chastity, self-control, virtue, and domesticity hints at an important shift in the values underlying middle-class respectability that occurred throughout the interwar years.
Indeed, McDougald’s emphasis on the need to reorder the public view of women as concretely tied to employment opportunities reflected broader changes in reformist efforts. By the early 1920s, the declining influence of moral reform in women’s organizations encountered rising concerns over economic issues. For example, in 1924, when Mary McLeod Bethune, an experienced educator, clubwoman, and organizer, became president of the NACW, she worked to realign the group’s focus more clearly around economic issues rather than women’s individual behaviors and morality.4 McDougald, herself a clubwoman, made an alternate connection: she exposed the link between popular stereotypes and the economic exclusion of women from employment across almost all fields that were opening to white working-class women throughout the late 1910s and 1920s. The distorted imagery fueled ideas of race, class, and gender difference that sustained discrimination, particularly in industrial labor in the North.
McDougald’s essay “The Task of Negro Womanhood” broke with older reformist traditions by foregrounding a scholarly and social scientific approach to define the problems facing modern women; it relied on investigations, firsthand observations, and data collected on women’s industrial, domestic, and professional employment. Though not without critique, McDougald’s essay appeared to fulfill the goal of The New Negro anthology—its editor, Alain Locke, presented the collection as “ample evidence of a New Negro in the latest phases of social change and progress.” Locke decried that the vast degree of public knowledge “is about the Negro rather than of him, so that it is the Negro problem rather than the Negro that is known and mooted in the general mind.”5 McDougald sanctioned this view with a focus on women. She reframed longer-standing justifications for challenging stereotypes by positioning claims to beauty rather than morality as necessary to this remaking; in doing so, the Harlem educator accentuated the political, social, and economic realities of women in the urban environment. “The Task of Negro Womanhood” argued for the increasing weight of employment, occupational status, and physical appearance as primary forces that shaped women’s negotiations with modernity, modernization, and the class aspirations of New Negro womanhood.
Writing in a decade characterized by the politically autonomous “New Woman,” race-proud “New Negroes,” and an energized youth culture, McDougald, born in 1884, was already middle-aged. Her lifelong commitment to service and respectability upheld middle-class tenets of racial uplift that characterized reform in the “Woman’s Era” of the late nineteenth century. At the same time, McDougald’s education and growing understanding of inequality as rooted in administrative mechanisms and institutions rather than solely in perceptions of individual behavior acknowledged the systemic working of discrimination based on race and sex. In this view, age alone cannot render McDougald as a transitional figure who studied, wrote, and reflected on the employment issues of modern or New Negro women: her role as a professional educator underscores the continuity and disconnect of middle-class women’s activism between these two time periods.
By the 1920s, New Negro women were many things. Some like McDougald were transitioning figures who were already tired in an era characterized by a vibrant youth culture energized by jazz, automobiles, flapperdom, and the mass consumption of cosmetics, clothing, records, books, and magazines. Others, also like McDougald, held to an older race politics of respectability and service, while at the same time pioneering new fields in African American women’s professionalized labor. Formal and higher education grew increasingly important for women younger than McDougald as women’s waged work took on enhanced importance in urban living. Others still, like McDougald, found their careers punctuated by marriage and motherhood; they were compelled to negotiate those breaks and reenter the workforce to support middle-class lifestyles and advance their ambitions. Finally, New Negro women like McDougald were also concerned about beauty. Technically “middle-aged” at the time of The New Negro’s publication, McDougald’s concern with the “multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women” showcases beauty as not merely a youthful concern or matter of superficial vanity among modern middle-class women who were seen to emblematize New Negro womanhood of this decade.6
This chapter undertakes a twofold approach to study the emergence of brown beauty as a development in Harlem Renaissance literary print culture. First, it examines the relatively obscure life of Gertrude Elise Johnson McDougald Ayer. By tracing McDougald’s biography and exploring her professional development in social scientific work, labor organizing, vocational guidance, and education, this chapter highlights the connections between women’s public image and women’s labor. It further questions how McDougald’s physical image came to embody the “brown beauty” featured in Locke’s New Negro by examining a series of portraits created by Winold Reiss, a white German-born male artist whose prefiguration of brown complexions emerged as central to his artistic rendering of Harlem’s New Negroes. Reiss’s portraits provide one window into understanding how beauty grew to be represented through brown complexions and how the trope of color developed to form one primary means to communicate race collectivizing ideas and gendered ideals among middle-class and aspiring New Negroes.
By the 1920s, beauty and brownness, two physical determinations that were modern and malleable in meaning, emerged as modern characteristics with the potential power to offset racist views of African American women. In explaining how these stereotypes impinged on the lives of New Negro women, McDougald described how this “shadow over [women]” perpetuated feelings of “self-doubt” and “personal inferiority.” Although McDougald’s essay foregrounded empirical data to support her presentation of “The Task of Negro Women” on beauty’s effect, she underscored that the “potent and detrimental influences” over New Negro women were not always easy to recognize “because they are in the realm of the mental and spiritual.”7

Gertrude Elise Johnson McDougald Ayer

Gertrude Elise Johnson McDougald Ayer offers a compelling portrait of one modern African American woman about whom still much is left to know. Obscured from the view of contemporary scholars, Ayer was a public figure whose professional accomplishments were widely reported in local newspapers, national magazines, and in the African American press. A substantial portion of the Gertrude Elise Ayer Papers, a small, largely unmined archival collection acquired by auction in 1985 and donated to the Schomburg Center, consists of scrapbooks kept by McDougald. Spanning a period of thirty years (1931–66), the scrapbooks document her professional and prominent career as the first African American principal in the New York City school system. The scrapbook is filled with newspaper clippings and other documents recording the accolades McDougald received for her work as an educator. In their microfilmed format, many news clippings show signs of material wear and tear; the originals, destroyed after filming due to their degraded condition, cannot be consulted. It is not impossible to trace some of the better-preserved news clippings to the source of their original publication, but the scrapbook is most extraordinary in underscoring the important role of African American print culture, namely newspapers and periodicals and magazines, in documenting the lives of ordinary women who maintained records of their extraordinary success.
McDougald’s two different first and last names have resulted in McDougald’s relative invisibility in scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance. Francille Rusan Wilson explains, “historians . . . separate her life as if she were three different people.”8 Born Gertrude Elise Johnson in New York City in 1884, the “prominent figure in Gotham educational circles” assumed the McDougald surname upon marriage to Attorney Neal McDougald in 1911.9 The union resulted in two children, but it was an unhappy one that ended in divorce. In 1934, McDougald married physician Vernon A. Ayer, precipitating a name change to Gertrude Elise Ayer. Between 1934 and 1954, the period marking her appointment as first African American woman to the role of principal in a New York City public school to her retirement at the age of seventy, she was professionally known as Gertrude Elise Ayer.10 Throughout this work, I refer to Gertrude Elise Johnson McDougald Ayer as Elise Johnson McDougald; despite divorcing her husband in 1925, she used this name when publishing “The Task of Negro Womanhood” in The New Negro that same year. In addition, the portrait that provides the first view of the educator as a woman of brown-skinned beauty bore, in caption, the name Gertrude J. McDougald.
In addition to this confusion surrounding her name, Gertrude Elise Johnson McDougald Ayer has escaped serious scrutiny by historians partly because she has not been seen as part of the “mainstream” Harlem Renaissance movement.11 In 1990, biographers Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph predicted that McDougald’s “advanced” feminist ideas would attract the interest of scholars although no such bonanza has yet occurred.12 Readers familiar with the writings and visuals of the Harlem Renaissance have l...

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