Published: 4 March 2010
by DAN CARRIER

WOMEN! Want to know the secret to a fresh visage? Just follow these simple instructions, and radiant beauty will be all yours today and every day... “Fresh beef is cut into very thin slices, according to a pattern which you should make at home... Give your pattern to the butcher, who will cut your meat accordingly... Pack the meat over your skin and secure it with a strip of muslin... Leave it on for two hours, or over night if possible...” 

It doesn’t sound a very nice way to ensure your natural gorgeousness shines through – but it is one of the tips historian Professor Carol Dyhouse  discovered that women in the 1930s were told to try. 

The professor, who teaches at Sussex University, will be talking about her new book – a lively social history of 20th-century femininity – at Housman’s on Wednesday as part of a series of events to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8 and looking at what glamour means. 

Professor Dyhouse says she is fascinated by material and visual culture, clothes, cosmetics, fashions and inexpensive jewellery. 

“Flea markets, junk shops and car boot sales have always distracted me, offering a rich source of social history,” she says. “I am pharmacist’s daughter and was always enchanted by the jars of perfume samples my dad would bring home.”

Professpr Dyhouse has written widely on such topics as education and gender in the 19th and 20th centuries, and says this book follows on from her previous research. “When I first started out on this study, a few of my colleagues raised their eyebrows,” she says.

“As an academic historian, most of my previous research had focused on gender, family, and education. ‘So it’s out of the blue stockings and into the fishnets, is it?’ quipped a friend in the corridor. 

“But education is also about dreams and aspirations.”

She points out that glamour  was originally associated with American cinema between the 1930s and 1950s, the classic period of the Hollywood dream factory.

“Glamour has always been linked with artifice and performance,” she says, “and is generally seen as constituting a form of sophisticated – and often sexual – allure.”

She adds it has a history that is interwoven with changing constructions of femininity, consumerism, popular culture, fashion and celebrity. 

So what does glamour mean?

“What is fashionable is not always glamorous, and glamour has not always been fashionable,” she says.

“In 20th-century fashion, glamour has its clichés: glitter, fur, slinky dresses, hothouse flowers and a slash of bright red lips. Glamour was about luxury and excess. It spoke of power, sexuality and transgression. It could also be about pleasure, the sensuousness of fur, silk and rich fabrics.”

Professor Dyhouse points out that the that feminist critiques of glamour consider it to be about “oppressive prescriptions for feminine attractiveness bolstered by capitalism and patriarchy”. So can

glamour be blamed for a host of feminine insecurities, such as eating disorders? Or does glamour offer a form of empowerment? 

“On the one hand, it could be blamed for pressure on young girls to be thin, and can cause unhappiness, but I feel issues such as anorexia are often more complicated than that, though of course there are areas that we need to be concerned about.”

Professor Dyhouse has found glamour has been linked with feminine empowerment as well as patriarchal and economic oppression.  

“Glamorous women have been seen as a danger to men, rather than the pawns of patriarchy,” she says.

“But I do not really like using the word empowerment here – nothing empowers women as well as a good education and a well-paid job. But it is about self-assertion too.”

The growth of glamour in the Hollywood sense offered an escapism for working-class women.

Household expenditure surveys in the early part of the 20th century showed working-class women spent virtually nothing on themselves.

This has changed – spending on fashion and beauty products now mean women are represented as shoe addicts and shopaholics.

She also points out the glamour has not always been fashionable, and has been tarnished by its association with “cheesecake photography”.

But despite highlighting the negative connotations often associated with the term glamour, as Professor Dyhouse points out, it can be an “assertion of the entitlement to the pleasures of affluence. 

“It simply can’t be dismissed as oppressive, or male fantasy, but can carry celebratory meanings for women.”

• Glamour: Women, History, Feminism. By Carol Dyhouse. Zed Books £19.99