Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, A.
[Potter, Eliza]. A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life. Cincinnati: Published for the Author, 1859.
8vo.; front endpaper neatly excised; contemporary ownership signature penciled on first blank; foxing throughout; hinge cracked at rear blank; blue cloth stamped in blind; spine stamped in gilt; edgeworn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this best-selling high society tell-all—though full names and revealing dates are masked—by one of the first hairdressers in America: Eliza Potter (ca. 1820- ), a woman of mixed race who gained the trust and affection of white society in Cincinnati and, later, around the globe. Despite the fact that Potter surreptitiously lent her name only to the copyright page (the title page and binding bear only the book’s title), it is clear that her contemporaries were well aware of her authorship of the book. She left Cincinnati in 1861; one scholar implies she may have had to.
Potter begins with “My Debut”; chapters that follow include accounts of her work and travels in “England,” “America,” “Saratoga” (like the previous chapter, also labeled “Chapter III”), “Leaving Saratoga – Burning of the Baggage Car – Visit to New York,” “Newport – The Maid’s Story,” “Minnie,” “Natchez-New Orleans,” concluding with “Cincinnati” (like the previous chapter, also labeled “Chapter VII).
An important document for the study of antebellum women in business, race relations from East to West, North to South, the color blind facts about marriage for women of any race, and an “inside outsider’s” critique of white standards of beauty. A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life was published in facsimile in 1991 by the Oxford University Press as part of the 30 volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, with an introduction by Sharon G. Dean, from whose work we draw much of what follows. More recently, Xiomara Santamaria published “Black Hairdresser and Social Critic: Eliza Potter and the Labors of Femininity” in American Literature (77.1, 2005, pp. 151-77), defining Potter’s influence “in producing a model for race, independent labor, and gender that anticipated the norm for the independent ‘working lady’ that twentieth century white women factory workers would articulate as part of their efforts to render their status as workers compatible with their status as women” (p. 171).
Potter shares few details of her life in this memoir, which contains more observations on the hierarchy of American society than autobiographical facts. She admits no shame in having been married—“having committed a weakness, which has, from the beginning of time, numbered the most respectable of the earth among its victims” (Potter, p. 12)—but fails to mention her second marriage or either of the children indicated by an 1860 census. Dean writes, “Despite—or perhaps because of—Potter’s own experience with marriage, the female slavery inherent in the social convention becomes and ironic motif in the autobiography. There are numerous instances throughout her story of wives suffering abuse at the hands of irresponsible, cruel, and well-intentioned, if tyrannical, husbands” (Dean, p. lv).
The success of A Hairdresser’s Experience has been attributed to her lack of overt political message. By choice of subject matter—hairdressing—she presents herself as unthreatening to her readers, and by choice of style—parts of the book read like a modern day celebrity tabloid—she engages their attention. Indeed, in her two page preface, “The Author’s Appeal,” she claims that she writes for the “amusement” of the “many ladies and gentlemen” who have urged her in the pursuit, and defends her writing, despite her lack of erudition, by reminding her readers that “the mouths of babes and sucklings have, in other days, perfected the praise of the mightiest.” She adds, “Those days might come again.” Comparing herself to clergymen and doctors, she claims a unique position in knowing what lurks in the se
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