Abstract

How does the historical significance of the Black beauty salon create a certain character of its services and its salon operation? How does this nuanced character of Black hair salons create a contrast with white female operated salons? How does their emotional labor differ? The literature on this topic mostly identifies that all hair salons’ labor extends beyond just doing hair, as they rely on emotional labor to keep clients coming back. Yet, Black hair salons operate differently due to the gendered racism that pushes Black women to become entrepreneurs, an economic detour, where they cater to a limited market of other Black women, which marks the character of their services as influenced by their cultural and social being. White women, who don’t face the same racism in their entrepreneurship, operate with fewer stakes. I look at the portrayal of salons in film, analyzing Steel Magnolias, a film of a white female ensemble that centers on a hair salon run by a white woman, and Beauty Shop, a film of a majority-Black ensemble that centers on a Black woman salon owner. My findings reveal that in Beauty Shop, the Black woman salon owner must fight to gain respect and maintain her finances and the aesthetics of the shop, constantly fighting to keep her shop, which is a haven for the Black female clientele and their conversations, whom she advises and negotiates in a way that echoes cultural topics and ideals. Yet, in Steel Magnolias, the white female salon owner is already well respected with regulars, with no need to fight or worry about her shop, which is far from a safe space for her clientele, who speak freely everywhere they go. These findings illustrate that for Black hair salons, their Black female identity informs their labor in ways it does not for white hair salons, who navigate entrepreneurship with privilege.

Introduction

When one thinks about a hairstylist, there is an association that extends past the person who does hair. For many, hairstylists behave as not only experts surrounding hair, but also take on the role of friend, therapist, mother, and advisor. Essentially, a hairstylist’s work extends beyond just making sure to nail the client’s hairdo but also entails additional emotional work. With this being said, beyond just the broader understanding of a hairdresser, when it comes to understanding the labor of Black women hair stylists, the history of the Black hair salon, and the social and economic positioning of Black women inform this labor deeply. The Black hair salon is a safe space for Black women to congregate, unapologetically, segregated in a sort of haven. Here, beauticians and salon owners, Black female entrepreneurs, behave as leaders in their communities. These salons are cultural hubs and behave this way for a reason. As I begin to understand the broad understanding of hairstylists as well as the unique character of Black hair stylists, I want to examine how these dynamics manifest in Black and white hair salons and have sought to do so by looking at the ways in which they are imagined on film. Film, while often dramatized versions of reality, offer a wonderful insight into the social connotation of that reality, which is what I’m interested in. I will be examining these on-screen representations of hair salons, taking into account the ways of a Black hair salon and a white hair salon, and how the sociocultural aspects of their work impact the character of each one’s labor.

For Black women salon owners and operators, being entrepreneurs speak to a certain struggle, as Black female entrepreneurs face the shortcomings of systemic gendered racism, that keeps them from finding economic resources and making their own businesses. Due to this, a racial enclave arises, as Black folks are pushed from mainstream markets, where beauty salons are a market where Black women serve Black women. Their identity informs their labor, as it holds additional cultural weight. Which prompts the question: How does Black hair salon’s history economically and socially create a certain dynamic of its services and its salon operation? How do white hair salons, without this history, operate differently? How does their emotional labor differ? How does it compare? In an attempt to answer these, I examine the dynamics of the hair salon in the 1989 film Steel Magnolias and the 2005 film Beauty Shop. The films showcase relationships and services within the salon each film portrays, characterizing them in ways related to race, gender, and class.

Literature Review

Scholars have studied the ways labor within hair salons operates beyond just hairstyling. “The Emotional Consequences of Service Work: An Ethnographic Examination of Hair Salon Workers” ventures into the interaction between the emotional experiences of hair salon workers and the services they provide. It essentially offers a deeper look at the emotional labor of hair salon workers, and how it connects to customer satisfaction. Complimentary evaluations and intimacy garner feelings of pride and happiness and their opposites create feelings of anger and sadness. This intimacy between salon workers and their clients speaks to the ways the hair salon creates a need for emotional labor as stylists “make [clients] feel better,” physically and emotionally.¹ “The Emotional Consequences of Service Work” provides a broad understanding of the presence of emotional and physical labor as part of the labor within any hair salon, a-racially, and provides a foundation for understanding how this gendered service industry requires additional layers of labor within friendliness, cooperation, and intimacy.

This intimacy is essential to the success of hair salons, an idea that “When it Pays to be Friendly: Employment Relationship and Emotional Labour in Hairstyling,” studies through examining worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews with hourly paid and self-employed hair stylists in self-administered surveys. Their employment was found to be central to the deployment of emotional labor. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting and performing emotions, and enacting favors, making them prone to emotional breaking points. In contrast, hourly paid stylists perform surface-level acting, resist unpaid favors, and experience fewer breaking points.² In essence, emotional labor pays, but it at a cost to the well-being of the stylists who must deploy it. Yet, when it comes to Black hair salons, this emotional labor is influenced by the cultural, historical, and social characteristics of Black womanhood and their relationship to both their hair and the hair salon.

Adia M. Harvey Wingfield’s Doing Business with Beauty (and the article in which it’s based) laid the foundation for the body of my research, as while I analyze the difference between the labor of Black women hairstylists and white women hair stylists in their respective salons, understanding the specificity of Black women’s labor in the hair salon allows grounding for these differences. Wingfield examines this specificity, pointing to the intersectionality of Black female entrepreneurship by analyzing Black female salon owners.³ She points to ways Black women’s position in regard to race, gender, and class systems impact the process of becoming an entrepreneur and their interactions with stylists. Her findings showed that for these Black women hair stylists, the reasons for becoming entrepreneurs were gendered, as it enabled them to take care of their children and work full time. Also, she points to how it was informed by class and race, as being salon owners allowed a chance for upward economic mobility. Because these Black women did not typically have the social capital or financial support of friends and families in the ways white women would, leading to the race and class solidarity between salon owners and their stylists. With that being said, due to the circumstances of Black female entrepreneurship, the “ghettoization” of their labor which gave them less access to financial gain, this solidarity was not always present when it came to stylists who they deemed “unprofessional.” These findings are important to my research as it points to the unique circumstances and pressures of Black salon owners, circumstances, and pressures that heighten the stakes of their operation and labor in the hair industry.

A study by Andrea E. Smith‐Hunter and Robert L. Boyd looks into the stakes Wingfield provides historical background on by way of survey data. Their research explains the racial differences in women’s entrepreneurship, self-employment, and business ownership. It points to the reasons behind these differences as due to the gap between the high aspirations of minority women for business owners and the lack of resources that are available to these women like financial capital and social capital. The study details that minority women are more likely than white women to become business owners in order to be self-sufficient, avoid the disadvantages of navigating the labor market as minorities and women, and to earn more income. Yet, white women held an advantage in becoming business owners, as white women entrepreneurs relied less on personal resources, while minority women entrepreneurs depended more so on these personal resources for financial capital, including using friends and family as unpaid workers.  ⁴ This study is essential to my research, as it points not only to the layered reasoning of minority women business owners go to own and operate a business but the lower stakes white women entrepreneurs are presented as they pursue start-ups, which influences the ways these businesses are run, as stakes are higher for one more than the other.

Not only can we understand the difference in labor within hair salons by way of the economic and entrepreneurial differences between Black women and white women, but also by how gendered and racialized that the space of the Black hair salon is, and how Black women

navigated this space differently due to their Black womanhood and the, mostly, Black womanhood of their clients, which tells us about how Black-female run salons are operated differently than their white woman counterparts. On the relationship between race and space, Kimberly Battle-Waters, in the first three chapters of her book Sheila’s Shop, details the haven that Black beauty salons behave for Black women comes to light via analysis of conversations Black women have with each other and their stylists about politics, family, men, relationships, and more.⁵ Because Black women face challenges due to their Black womanhood, whether that be gendered racism or rejection or ridicule by Black men in their everyday life, this space behaves as an opportunity to discuss topics that matter to them, gossip, and seek advice from other Black women in the salon. This association and experience between Black women and the hair salon lend to the relationship between hairstylist and client to become more personal, involving not only emotional labor by the stylist but a need to protect the relationship by hiding disappointment in a hairstyle or remaining loyal to a stylist despite negatives, but a racialized and gendered intimacy that relies on the sacredness of the Black hair salon, which keeps customers coming back.

Through Battle-Waters work, we can understand the unique character of Black women’s hair salons, and of the client and stylist relationship within them, which births a unique communication between these two and their hair care. In chapter one of Jacob’s-Huey’s From the Kitchen to the Parlor, which dives into how Black women use language to negotiate the significance of hair in their lives, she navigates the “client-stylist negotiation” interaction between clients and stylists in hair salons in salons in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills, California, and in Charleston, South Carolina.⁶ Here, she explores the verbal and nonverbal strategies used by clients and stylists to mediate their “respective identities” as hair-care amateurs and experts while negotiating hair care. Jabobs-Huey finds that for Black women, who have been styling and caring for their hair prior to the salon visit, a challenge emerged between stylist and client, as figuring who would have authority over the hair care becomes difficult. To remedy this, stylists and clients use indirect and direct cues native to the cultural language. This is important because it presents the notion of a specific communication that takes place in Black hair salons, where the importance of a Black woman’s hair and the social and cultural cues within the Black community inform the ways clients and stylists negotiate hair styling. In essence, Black women’s position in the world shapes the why and how they open hair salons as well as the way they run their shops, from communication to conversations with their clients, making the experience one that’s unique to them and partially separate from the emotional labor and labor within white women’s hair salons.

Methods and Data

In order to examine the difference between Black women run and owned beauty salons and white women run and owned beauty salons, I conducted a content analysis of two films which reflect those two environments, Steel Magnolias, which revolves around a white beauty salon owned and operated by white women, and Beauty Shop, which centers on a Black beauty salon owned and operated by a Black woman. I will analyze their differences, characterizing them in ways related to their race, gender, and class. Steel Magnolias, 1989 film adaptation of the play of the same name, directed by Herbert Ross, tells the story of six white women in Chinquapin, Louisiana, who all get beauty services at Truvy’s Beauty Spot, a successful beauty salon run out of the home of Truvy Jones, played by Dolly Parton, where they all have a standing Saturday appointment. Truvy, who hires anxious Annelle, who just got out of a bad relationship and was down on her luck, as her assistant. Truvy and Annelle style the hair of many of the women about town: wealthy widow and former first lady of Chinquapin, Clairee Belcher; local “sourpuss” Ouiser Boudreaux; career woman M’Lynn and her daughter Shelby, who is diabetic and soon to get married—which is where we meet the ladies, on Shelby’s wedding day. Shelby’s engagement is the talk of the town, after her wedding, and the beginning of her marriage, she faces a risky pregnancy and health complications. Eventually, when Shelby dies from those complications related to her diabetes, M’Lynn has to deal with the loss of her child. The story follows the women as they comfort and support each other, and go through life sharing and advising out of Truvy’s hair salon.

Beauty Shop, the 2005 film directed by Billie Woodruff, revolves around Gina, played by Queen Latifah, a widowed hairstylist who moves from Chicago to Atlanta in order for her daughter Vanessa to attend a private music school. She’s a killer stylist yet works under a white male boss, Jorge, who is demeaning and hyper-critical, which leads her to leave her job and start-up her own beauty salon, which has been a lifelong dream of hers. After jumping through hurdles to get a loan, she purchases a rundown salon, where she inherits the previous hair stylists, Ms. Josephine, Ida, and Chanell, while also hiring her white friend from the previous salon, Lynn. Right off the bat, Gina deals with back-to-back complications, from two loudmouthed young stylists, older clients who doubt her, and the constant trouble of her sister-in-law, Darnelle. As time passes, the previous owner’s clients become her own, and many of the clients from Jorge’s salon switch to hers. When electrical issues arise, Joe, an electrician (and Gina’s love interest) helps her out. But more problems arise as Jorge pays a health inspector to find various ways to shut down Gina’s business. Gina keeps pushing past these barriers, bonding with her clients and the neighborhood, becoming a part of their community, and building one between clients and stylists.

Things are going well for Gina, as one of her former clients uses her connections to set up a meeting with Cover Girl for Gina’s “hair crack,” a homemade miracle conditioner, but it falls through after Gina refuses to fire Lynn at the client’s insistence (the client is attracted to the male stylist, James, whom Lynn is seeing). More problems come Gina’s way when her shop is trashed and vandalized, but the new community she found helps her clean it up, and she finds that Darnelle has decided to attend beauty school. With help from Vanessa’s friend, they find out Jorge was behind all the chaos. When a woman enters the shop and begs for someone to fix her hair for a wedding, who turns out to be their favorite radio talk-show host DJ Hollerin’ Helen, who gives the shop and Gina’s “hair crack” a shout-out.

It must be stated that both films take place in two different time periods, and while both are comedies, “Beauty Shop” is less dramatic than “Steel Magnolias” so the discussion here will have evidence of those differences, as certain situations that inform the analysis will look different due to the time and tonal differences rather than just the race and gender of the each films’ ensembles. In order to analyze the differences and similarities between the environments these two films represent, I will be examining the following: 1. How each shop was set up, and the difficulties or lack thereof in doing so, and the location and position of each shop; 2. How each shop is run, how management looks for each shop operator; 3. The labor beyond just hairstyling within the shop, how much of this labor they take outside of the shop and home with them; 4. The relationships between client and hairstylists and the conversations they have and where those conversations are held; and 5. hardships and triumphs that come with running the shop, what these look like for each hair salon.

Findings

In Beauty Shop, Gina goes through a series of complications setting up and running the shop than Truvy, in Steel Magnolias, whose conflicts are with her husband and her clients’ problems. Gina must hustle to get a loan, work to make a name for herself and her new shop, mediate and organize her other stylists, and sustain through the many attacks of Jorge to be successful. While Truvy, with one assistant and a shop that operates from her home, runs the most successful beauty shop in their town. She does not have to fight for respectability, she already has it, even when operating in less “professional” circumstances than Gina. With this being said, Truvy takes on the character of a “sweet southern white woman,” who gives colloquial sayings and performs her femininity in a way that resembles the societal understanding of “white femininity,” while Gina has been tougher and do “masculine” things while performing gendered labor in order to protect herself, her family, and her business.

Part of Gina’s maintenance of her shop revolves around negotiating with clients about their hair, as when two regulars of the previous owner come to the shop that is now hers, she offers to do their hair for free. Throughout the film, Gina mediates their desires for how they want their hair to look and what’s best for their hair or what she views will look good on their hair, embracing push back and not running away from it. But for Truvy, her styling revolves around just listening to what her regulars want and delivering. Yet, both Gina and Truvy manage their clients’ emotions, de-escalating conflict, and tending to their needs, breakdowns, and all. Truvy knows her clients and their illnesses, helping out Judy win she goes into diabetic shock and Gina de-escalates conflicts between Darnelle and her ex, Lynn and the other stylists, and calms and therapies her when her husband is acting up, as well as repairs her hair.

The women of Steel Magnolias are constantly in other places around their town more than the shop, continuing the same gossiping and ranting about family issues that they have in the beauty salon. Truvy’s emotional labor within her shop (and beyond it apparently) carries into the night, past just work in the shop and in her home, as Truvy’s shop is in her home, and there isn’t much separation from her work and personal life. While Gina is similar in that problems with the shop carry into her home life and relationship with Joe and her daughter, Vanessa, who both are often in the shop and help with the shop, the problems of her clients don’t carry; Gina has more separation between her clients and her personal life than Truvy. As for Gina, in Beauty Shop, we only see clients and stylists interact within the salon about their issues within the salon because for them the shop is protected as much as it is a community space, as Black women face scrutiny and rejection in the outside world when vulnerable.

Due to the “sacredness” of Gina’s shop and the lack thereof in Truvy’s, in Beauty Shop the stylists are more protective of their space, as Lynn, a white woman in a Black salon, must prove herself to the other stylists, which borderline leads to her performing Blackness in a way, as the Black stylists are exclusive about their space and profession. Also, Gina and stylists shoo men passersby out of the shop. In both films, men or “outsiders” don’t have a large presence in the beauty salon, yet in Beauty Shop actively defend their space, while for Truvy’s Beauty Spot, it doesn’t seem necessary too. This is also influenced by the fact the salon in Steel Magnolias is in the suburbs, while the salon in Beauty Shop is in inner-city Atlanta, where there is more interaction with the community.

Discussion

Gina’s shop echoes the environment of a racial enclave and is informed by the history of the Black beauty salon, where Black women must hold themselves and the community that centers their salons up, as their becoming and maintaining of entrepreneurship status allowed a chance for upward economic mobility. Due to the lack of social capital or financial support of friends and families to which white women had more access, they relied and operated among race and class solidarity between salon owners and their stylists. This makes the salon space for Black women, breeding a specific communication and conversation centered around Black womanhood, relationship becoming an example of the relationship between race and space. The conversations within Gina’s salon have deeply cultural and social tones, and revolve around Blackness and their personal definitions of Blackness and popular cultural phenomena, as they listen to a Black woman’s radio station loudly in the shop. Discourse within Truvy’s shop is much more broad, as they discuss their personal lives without having a communal experience that is influenced by their whiteness.

On the other hand, Truvy and the salon she runs shows the privilege that white women hold as they become entrepreneurs, as she holds social and financial capital that Gina does not, lending to the way Gina must work to begin to receive the same respect within their gendered labor. The women of Steel Magnolias have a much different relationship to space, as they roam the world much more freely, as their whiteness protects them, in ways, it doesn’t for Gina and her clients who must protect themselves, with their hair salon.

Another finding that gives more understanding surrounding the intersection of beauty salons and race and gender is Gina’s performance of masculinity within her femininity. Not only is Gina the breadwinner within her household, she does manual labor on the shop, and guards the shop from those who threaten its peace or place her people in danger. On the other hand, Truvy performs a form of femininity that is dainty and sweet, never really getting her hands dirty, or facing any conflict with regard to the shop, just her clients and her personal life. Due to Gina’s need to put on many hats, Gina’s has the ability to switch off her emotional labor once she’s out of the shop, but Truvy doesn’t have this separation, which may be due to not having to constantly change depending on the place and circumstance for safety or respectability as a Black woman, in the way Gina does in regards to space, place, and her role as salon owner and operator, which is something that’s not touched on much.

Conclusion

Through examining Steel Magnolias and Beauty Shop, two different films surrounding two different experiences around the same profession, we are given insight into how race and gender intersect and make that same profession completely different between the Black women who run and frequent their salon and the white women who do the same. Both films show there is so much more to beauty than how it’s perceived as “surface level” but its labor is gendered and racialized, as women find community within the performance of their femininity within their labor, however it’s defined. While film tends to be a reflection of the context of the society it mirrors, there is much that can be questioned, and in order to thoroughly confirm the presence of these differences in labor due to race and gender, I would hope to further examine films that center around Black and white hair salons, but also begin to look at narratives of other minority female-operated salons, and compare my findings of these two Black and white salons. Through this research, we can begin to understand the inner workings of laboring women, and how their race and gender characterize that labor, and the communities that form around them.

 

1. Terrence D. Hill and Chrisopher Bradley, “The Emotional Consequences of Service Work: An Ethnographic Examination of Hair Salon Workers,” Sociological Focus 43, no. 1 (2010): 41-60.
2. Rachel Lara Cohen, “When it Pays to be Friendly: Employment Relationship and Emotional Labour in Hairstyling.” The Sociological Review 58, no. 2 (2010): 197-218.
3. Aida M. Harvey Wingfield, “Becoming Entrepreneurs: Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender at the Black Beauty Salon,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6, (December 2005): 789–808.
4. A. E. Smith‐Hunter and R. L. Boyd, “Applying Theories of Entrepreneurship to a Comparative Analysis of White and Minority Women Business Owners,” Women in Management Review 19, No. 1 (2004): 18-28.
5. Kimberly Battle-Walters, Sheila’s Shop: Working-Class African American Women Talk About Life, Love, Race, and Hair (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
6. Lanita Jacobs-Huey, From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African-American Women’s Hair Care (Oxford University Press, 2006).