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Julie A. Willett, Blain Roberts. Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South., The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 268–269, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.268
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Scholars have long understood that the body and style are entrenched in political meaning and power, but the degree to which beauty mediated the crisis of modernity in the twentieth-century South is what makes Blain Roberts's examination of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South such a crucial contribution to the study of race, consumption, and southern history. From festival queens touting agricultural products and the sanctity of whiteness to college beauty contestants saluting black power, Roberts traces how African American and white women's bodies and beauty practices were so inextricably bound to race that it both masked and exacerbated class tensions, assumptions of rural backwardness, and the ebb and flow of gender and generational difference. As Roberts so convincingly argues, “[b]y making women's bodies do important work on behalf of their race, both white and black southerners blunted their disconcerting modernity” (p. 8). Indeed, Roberts powerfully yet proactively asserts, “female beauty in the American South was, more so than in the rest of the country, deeply racialized” (p. 7). Perhaps it is not so ironic that southern beauty became an icon for a nation, whose collective identity profoundly turned on contested notions of race and respectability that often went beyond black and white.
