My Research

My first book, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 is due out from The University Press of Kentucky in the Spring of 2007. The image to the left is a mock-up of the cover. Here is the catalog announcement from the press:

In Style and Status, Susannah F. Walker examines twentieth-century commercial beauty culture in terms of race and gender, demonstrating that while black women’s beauty culture mirrored that of white women in important ways, it was distinctive because it explicitly articulated racial politics in the United States.

African American women confronted daily the tension between the idea that beautifying themselves according to the standards of the day enhanced their modernity and success, and the idea that doing so was capitulating to a white beauty ideal that excluded and denigrated them. That confrontation not only reflected race and gender politics but helped to fuel the struggle for black equality during the 1960s and 1970s. Walker reveals the participation of African Americans in consumer culture and draws connections between consumer culture, black women’s racial identity, African American notions of femininity, and black social and political consciousness.

Currently I am working on an essay about African American consumerism in the post-World War II urban context, and I'm revising an article titled: "'Independent Livings Made': Beauty Culture as an Occupation for African-American Women, 1920 to the Civil Rights Era"

I am also in the preliminary stages of a new project about the the "Lonely Hearts Murders" trial that happened in New York City in 1949.


		My Research My first book, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 is due out from The University Press of Kentucky in the Spring of 2007. The image to the left is a mock-up of the cover. Here is the catalog announcement from the press: In Style and Status, Susannah F. Walker examines twentieth-century commercial beauty culture in terms of race and gender, demonstrating that while black women’s beauty culture mirrored that of white women in important ways, it was distinctive because it explicitly articulated racial politics in the United States. African American women confronted daily the tension between the idea that beautifying themselves according to the standards of the day enhanced their modernity and success, and the idea that doing so was capitulating to a white beauty ideal that excluded and denigrated them. That confrontation not only reflected race and gender politics but helped to fuel the struggle for black equality during the 1960s and 1970s. Walker reveals the participation of African Americans in consumer culture and draws connections between consumer culture, black women’s racial identity, African American notions of femininity, and black social and political consciousness. Currently I am working on an essay about African American consumerism in the post-World War II urban context, and I'm revising an article titled: "'Independent Livings Made': Beauty Culture as an Occupation for African-American Women, 1920 to the Civil Rights Era" I am also in the preliminary stages of a new project about the the "Lonely Hearts Murders" trial that happened in New York City in 1949.