Between 1950 and 1975, as stigma surrounding participation in the beauty industry faded and second-wave feminism challenged gender inequality, women used their voices and bodies to put forth their own interpretations of modern womanhood. While this panel takes seriously the agentic use of beauty for women’s own purposes, it also seeks to understand the limitations that accompanied racialized and exoticized beauty. Olivia Wing’s paper focuses on the pressures that Chinese and Japanese American women faced to represent their communities, as well as the myriad opportunities opened to them, as participants in ethnic pageants during Seattle’s city-wide Seafair Festival in the 1950s. Even when women crafted their own political image to great effect, their beauty often delegitimized their immense political contributions. Angelika Joseph’s work interrogates this pattern by analyzing the influence and subsequent dismissal of explicitly-indigenous female beauty in starting the Chicago Indian Village, a group of urban Indigenous activists that lived in tipis and campsites from 1970-1972. Women also faced pressures along generational and gendered lines within their own communities. In her paper on the Italian-Canadian paper Corriere Canadese, Abril Liberatori illustrates how prescriptive representations of a certain kind of feminine aesthetic reveal diasporic tensions over shifts in the meaning of Italian womanhood in Canada.

This panel explores the key tension between the elevation of women as cultural ambassadors and the simultaneous dismissal of beauty as trivial. Each of these papers draws on visual and written media as key source bases. As these papers demonstrate, women became the face of twentieth-century resistance movements, cultural celebrations, and nostalgic Old-World connections to diasporic homelands. And yet, the role of beauty in these women’s representations deserves further study and conversation.