Vol. 79/No. 10      March 23, 2015

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
In 1954 a sharp debate broke out in the pages of the Militant, the weekly newspaper that reflects the views of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. The controversy, surprisingly enough, was over the relation of the marketing of cosmetics and fashions to the oppression of women. Militant editor Joseph Hansen, using the pen name Jack Bustelo, wrote an item headlined “Sagging Cosmetic Lines Try a Face Lift.” This book opens with Bustelo’s article. It is a lively, short exposé of the ways in which the owners of the big cosmetics companies try to manipulate women’s insecurities and fears to sell commodities and rake in massive profits.

The article prompted a rapid letter of protest to the editor, charging that Bustelo was ridiculing women. The reader said Bustelo was challenging the right of working-class women to strive for “some loveliness and beauty in their lives.” Bustelo’s response in the Militant letters column evoked a further round of protests.

It soon became clear that the substantive political questions emerging from this at-first seemingly minor controversy merited a more extensive discussion than could be aired in the pages of the Militant. Since many of the contributors to the letters column were also members of the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP’s Political Committee decided to open an organized debate in the party’s internal Discussion Bulletin.

This book, Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women , is drawn from the record of this debate, which came to be known in the history of the Socialist Workers Party as the “Bustelo controversy.”

While the expanding production and marketing of cosmetics hardly seems to be a topic of great importance, this discussion was neither frivolous, nor an academic sociological dispute. It was one expression of the struggle to maintain a proletarian party and Marxist program throughout the cold war and anticommunist witch-hunt of the early 1950s.

Three decades later, many women will recognize that most of the questions discussed here — and the social pressures they reflect — are still with us. …

Both [Evelyn] Reed and Hansen (still using the pen name of Bustelo) also wrote major articles for the Discussion Bulletin taking up the issues raised directly by the “cosmetics” debate. The polemical tone and language of their contributions reflect their origin and purpose, which was to advance political clarification within the SWP. No attempt has been made to change the authors’ original styles. Readers will find in these pages all the rich flavor of a real debate, the product of the political conditions and social pressures of the time.

Bustelo’s article, entitled “The Fetish of Cosmetics,” is a basic piece of Marxist education on capitalism and commodity fetishism. It explains the controversy in the context of the economic and social conditions of post-World War II U.S. society. The author’s sense of humor, moreover, makes for enjoyable reading.

Reed’s reply, “The Woman Question and the Marxist Method,” takes up the issues from a materialist standpoint, as well: norms of beauty, like humanity itself, are the historical and changing product of social labor and cannot be dissociated from the development of the productive forces or from the class struggle.

Reed also comments on the social and political context of the debate. The “past fourteen years of war boom and prosperity have produced a conservatizing effect upon the working class which we describe as a ‘bourgeoisification,’” she states. “One of the forms this takes is the readiness of the workers to accept bourgeois opinions and propaganda as scientific truth and adapt themselves to it.

“Like the whole working class,” Reed emphasized, “the party is under constant pressure and bombardment from this massive bourgeois propaganda machine.” Some of the discussions taking place in the SWP indicate that “a certain amount of adaptation to bourgeois propaganda has arisen which, although probably unwitting, is a signal that should alert us to the danger.”

That is what the cosmetics controversy clearly revealed. “When the comrades defend the right of women to use cosmetics, fashions, etc.,” Reed stated, “without clearly distinguishing between such a right and the capitalist social compulsion to use them, they have fallen into the trap of bourgeois propaganda.”

It is true, she went on, that “so long as capitalism prevails, we must abide by these cosmetic and fashion decrees.” … We must give at least a token recognition of the harsh reality. But this does not mean that we must accept these edicts and compulsions complacently, or without protest. The workers in the plants are often obliged to accept speedups, pay cuts, and attacks on their unions. But they always and invariably accept them under protest, under continuing struggle against them, and in a constant movement to oppose their needs and will against their exploiters.

“The class struggle is a movement of opposition, not adaptation,” Reed said, “and this holds true not only of the workers in the plants, but of the women as well. …”

That conclusion, we could add, holds equally true for today. And in that spirit, the following book has been prepared.  
 
 
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