In contrast to “unprofessional” places, where “gossip” occurs, the Cardozos take every pain to ensure that their salon would never become “a hell-of-a-place / to ferment / a revolution.” Nonetheless, the Cardozos were businesswomen. Whatever reservations they might have harbored about the ethics of the aesthetics of the natural, they knew which way the tide was turning and they were determined not to be left out. In the face of dwindling returns, natural-hair services were added to the Cardozos’ roster. It is precisely this type of calculating decision that leaves me at times suspicious of the motivations of some of our newly woke faves. But that’s none of my business.
The Cardozo family’s experiences are far removed from those of typical black Americans of that time. Margaret talks about a trip to Paris with another sister, Emmeta. In the 1930s, the “beautiful” (i.e., almost white-looking) Emmeta Hurley, née Cardozo, enjoyed a successful modeling career with the New York Mirror, an opportunity impossible for a woman who looked identifiably black. Emmeta even had a spell working as one of the iconic Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. At that time, Ziegfeld wouldn’t have hired a Negro performer, so the implication is that she passed as white. Her story reminds us of the power of hair to confer racial status. You see, Emmeta had a secret shame, one that had to be rigorously policed. As Elizabeth explains:
I was always the best at kinky hair because that was what I had started with. If I do say it myself, I could do a beautiful job of giving what they call the hard-press. With so much skill with that pressing iron and so little grease you’d take a very hard kinky head of hair and you could press it so that it almost looked like straight hair. One of the reasons that made this so important to us, to get that look, was because the sister who was with the Follies had kinky hair. She didn’t look like she had kinky hair, because she had the features and everything of a white person or a foreigner. So it was very necessary for her to know exactly what to do or what to have done with her hair.
She had someone who would do it, but sometimes she would perspire, and maybe you know what that will do to pressed hair. She knew exactly how to handle it. I used to say that she went down under the skin before it even got to the roots. When you looked at her hair it was a satin finish. It was beautiful. It was real art. I don’t think people do that much anymore because very few people want their hair pressed that thoroughly. [my italics]
“She went down under the skin.” A painful image, suggesting something elemental, cruelly disfigured, of blackness kept at bay, the cost of external acceptance in a world not of our own design.
As well as potentially passing as white to model, Emmeta had trained as a hairdresser, which suggests the level of social status offered by the profession:
[In 1927] we inherited a few thousand dollars. We thought we wanted Meta to learn a trade that would keep her occupied and have a little bit of glamour to it, so we decided that she should go to Paris and learn the beauty trade. I stayed there six weeks and at that time it was a very nice time to be in Paris because it was the time of Josephine Baker and all of the beautiful entertainers were in Paris at that time.
Don’t forget that France had established itself as the home of the hot press and the marcel wave. It was believed that some of the best stylists in these methods could be found there. The reference to Josephine Baker is significant also. Even this most feted chanteuse was cashing in on the beauty business.
By the 1930s Baker’s image was visible on a wide range of products. She capitalized on the craze for all things black. Similarly to Rihanna and Fenty Beauty, which was launched in 2017, Baker’s manager saw a gap in the market and was hugely successful. The chanteuse launched “The Baker Look,” which included a skin-darkening product called Bakerskin and Bakerfix, and a pomade for slicking back and glossing the hair (arguably copied from a Madam Walker formula—do we see a pattern emerging here?).
These products were marketed to and subsequently snapped up by wealthy white Parisian women desperate to achieve the famous Baker look. It has been suggested that the success of the Revue Nègre, combined with the influential appropriation of African art by avant-garde artists like Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and Braque, as well as Baker’s unparalleled popularity, created a “trend for blackness.” Many argue that this was the source of the tanning craze that started in France and went on to transform Western beauty ideals. The similarities with today are many. One of the most obvious examples is the hyper-visible black female celebrities of today, those whose mixed ancestry is evident in their golden-brown skin or their green eyes. There is evidence to suggest that Baker’s father was a white man; certainly, to look at her, it is clear to see that she has significant white ancestry.
Given white women’s desire to achieve the Baker look, it is ironic, yet unsurprising, that much of Baker’s personal beauty regimen was centered around skin lightening through milk baths and lemon rubs. In this we see the early antecedents of today’s beauty ideals, coalescing around light-skinned or white, tanned bodies with the lips and behinds of black women, and the straight, shiny, lustrous hair of Asian women. The Kardashian-Jenner clan represent the fullest contemporary expression of this look.
Despite the Cardozos’ privilege, details from their lives remind us that we must remain alert to the ways in which race and class intersect and that it can be misleading to conflate the experiences and social position of the black middle class with middle-class white realities.
The convent school the sisters attended had no greater aspirations for its pupils than the production of good house servants. In addition to substandard schooling, throughout her life Catherine was forced to undertake menial and administrative labor. In fact, the Cardozo sisters’ business developed out of Elizabeth’s precarious financial position. A divorced mother of two young sons, she desperately needed to generate income. Hairdressing that could be done from home provided much-needed income while at the same time solving her childcare issues. In the end, her informal education—the childhood spent assisting her grandmother Emma—turned out to be of far greater value than the schooling that was accessible to black folks, even those who were “privileged.”
Like other savvy hair capitalists, the Cardozos ran a salon that adapted and modified the natural style to save their business, part of a wider process that ultimately contributed to the commodification of the Afro. As Blain Roberts puts it, “the trajectory of Angela Davis’ famous hair, by becoming a model for wig makers, highlighted this in vivid terms. Manufacturers of beauty products accelerated the trend. From Madam C. J. Walker to Clairol, black- and white-owned brands alike marketed products for use on natural hair.” Roberts argues that “the assimilation of ‘the natural’ into black beauty culture represented a betrayal of the politics of the styles. The whole point of rejecting straightened hair was rejecting artificial manipulation.”31 The same argument applies today.
REPRESENTATION OR LIBERATION?
People are quick to highlight parallels between the black activism of the 1960s and ’70s with today’s movements. In truth, there are major distinctions and, in relation to hair, the different ideologies that underpin both movements have a direct effect on how “natural” our natural hair looks.