Beauty Shop Politics
Looking through the lens of black business history, Beauty Shop Politics shows how black beauticians in the Jim Crow era parlayed their economic independence and access to a public community space into platforms for activism. Tiffany M. Gill argues that the beauty industry played a crucial role in the creation of the modern black female identity and that the seemingly frivolous space of a beauty salon actually has stimulated social, political, and economic change.
PRAISE FOR BEAUTY SHOP POLITICS
“…If I were to recommend one book to read on the African American beauty industry, this would be the one.”
— Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Professor of American Studies
“There’s a fabulous book, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill, about African American hair salons and their owners during the 1960s—women who changed the entire landscape of the South… Thanks to their bravery and entrepreneurship, this country is a better and more just place.”
— Academy Award-winning actress Reese Witherspoon, Whiskey in a Tea Cup: What Growing Up in the South Taught me about Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits
To Turn the Whole World Over
Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns.
To Turn the Whole World Over examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements.