The hair of slave women was often covered and wrapped with rags and other pieces of cloth.
#Wolf cut female aesthetic skin
Forced into an unfamiliar environment, slave men and women became innovators, using natural substances such as berries and herbs for hairdressing and skin care. However, the vast majority of African Americans maintained their own conception of hairstyle and adornment. Evidence exists, for example, that urban male slaves in New York in the seventeenth century styled their hair to resemble the popular wigs worn at the time by white men. Slaves in close contact with whites -northern slaves, urban slaves, and house slaves -were constantly confronted with white beauty aesthetics and at times adopted white beauty practices. Advertisements for runaway slaves, for example, often contained descriptions of black hair characterizing it as "bushy" or "woolly." Stereotypical caricatures about African Americans that relied on exaggerated depictions of thick black lips, unkempt black hair, and dark black skin -most notably in minstrel shows -pervaded white popular culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The images, drawings, and depictions of slave men's and women's hair that remain in the historical record are often colored by these racist assumptions. For many whites, blacks' social, economic, and political subordination as slaves was justified by physical appearance. These physical characteristics were perceived as the very antithesis of beauty by many whites who conformed to a European standard of beauty that placed primacy upon white skin and straight hair. Although there was much diversity in black skin color and hair texture and curl structure, to whites, black hair type -generally thick, tightly curled hair -rivaled skin color as one of the most distinctive features of Africans. In America, African hair and beauty traditions underwent a complex process of cultural continuity, acculturation, and transformation. Enslaved Africans brought diverse notions of beauty to North America. We conclude that ‘aesthetic capital’ can be seen as not so much something that individuals accumulate and utilise but as something that context-dependent gendered norms regulate.Hair and Beauty Culture in the United StatesĪfrican-American men and women have often used their hair and faces as sites of artistry and as a means of self-expression.
A double standard in accumulation means more approval of women's behaviour, whereas a double standard in utilisation implies more disapproval of women's conduct. This indicates the existence of double standards is context dependent. Our study shows that there are double standards in certain norms regarding the accumulation and utilisation of ‘aesthetic capital’. In this paper, we turn our attention to such gendered norms, that is, double standards, by analysing unique measures for both accumulation and utilisation based on a split-ballot survey design. However, previous research has not paid attention to societal norms that may regulate the accumulation and utilisation of ‘aesthetic capital’ differently for men and women.
The logic suggests that ‘aesthetic capital’, like other forms of capital, can be accumulated and utilised in economic and social exchange. Physical appearance as a form of capital has received increasing attention in sociology in recent years.
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