HAVANA — “How do capitalism’s cosmetics and fashion ‘industries’ play on the emotional, sexual and economic insecurities of women and adolescents to generate profits?”
That question was at the heart of a lively exchange here among panelists and audience members at a Feb. 18 presentation of the new edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women, published by Pathfinder Press. The new title, available in English, Spanish, and now French, was launched as part of the 10-day Havana International Book Fair, Cuba’s largest cultural festival. It was held at the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center.
Among those attending the meeting were longtime readers of books published by Pathfinder as well as people learning about them for the first time. Several expressed surprise and delight when, among the audience, they met two historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution.
One was Brig. Gen. Delsa “Teté” Puebla, who was second in command of the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon in the Rebel Army. Under Fidel Castro the Rebel Army led the popular struggle that in 1959 overthrew a U.S.-backed dictatorship and opened the first socialist revolution in the Americas. The other “histórico” in the audience was Commander Víctor Dreke, a Rebel Army combatant as well as a leader of Cuban internationalist volunteers who fought in the Congo and Guinea-Bissau in the mid-1960s.
In introducing the program, attended by some 30 people, moderator Martín Koppel, a Pathfinder staff editor, noted that “although this is the fourth edition, it’s really a new book.” It includes a new preface and opening chapter by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
The book’s other authors are Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed. Hansen was a central leader of the SWP for four decades. Reed, who took on many party responsibilities over the years, including editorial leadership on the Militant staff, wrote numerous works on the origins of women’s oppression and the fight for their emancipation.
The program began with remarks by Esther Pérez, who translated the Spanish-language edition. Pérez is well-known in Cuba as a translator, editor, writer and educator. “Esther is also a compañera with whom Pathfinder and members of the Socialist Workers Party have worked since the early 1960s,” Koppel said in introducing her.
Capital appropriated adornment
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women “isn’t about whether or not someone chooses to use cosmetics. It’s about what happens when capitalism appropriates it,” said Pérez.
“Since the beginning of humanity, various ways of adorning or deforming body parts were used to mark a person according to a particular ethnic or sex group. Capitalism changed the function of adornment into the cosmetics industry. And women were the first victims of that market,” she said.
“But capitalism is always looking for new markets. They weren’t content to stop with women, or even men. Today they target what they view as a new niche — children, both girls and boys,” she said, to nods in the audience. This is one of the points developed in the first chapter of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women.
Pérez pointed to how the drug eflornithine was developed in the 1990s to treat sleeping sickness, which has killed tens of thousands of people in Africa. After a few years the giant corporation Aventis stopped manufacturing the drug because its African market was not profitable enough. Instead, capitalists found it more profitable to sell the virtually identical product as Vaniqa, a cream that prevents facial hair in women. Only in 2001 did medical production of eflornithine resume, after thousands more Africans had died of sleeping sickness.
“That’s capitalism — selling women ‘beauty’ before saving lives,” Pérez said.
‘The fetish of cosmetics’
The other panelist was Mary-Alice Waters. The book, she said, describes how capitalism “turns not only cosmetics but all our economic and social relations into commodities to be bought and sold.”
One of the most valuable articles in the book, Waters noted, is “The Fetish of Cosmetics,” by Joseph Hansen. He explains that cosmetics and clothing are distinguished from other commodities by the fact “that sexual relations attach to them. And that is used by the ‘merchants of beauty’ to increase their profits, to exploit the economic, social and sexual insecurities of women and adolescents above all.”
Today, Waters said, “the resources devoted by capitalist enterprises to advertising and the creation of markets — that is, creating ‘needs’ that don’t naturally exist — have expanded astronomically, and continue to expand. ‘Things’ you must have to be happy are pushed on hapless ‘consumers’ without pause — including younger and younger children!”
Under capitalist domination, she noted, “the internet and the misnamed ‘social media’ have become new and more powerful tools by which capitalist ideology, morals and commodities intrude into our lives every minute of the day.”
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women helps us understand that the oppression of women “is not a product of our biology,” Waters said. “It’s an economic, a social relationship that is the product of class society.”
“We are today living through the opening of what will be years of worldwide economic, financial, and social convulsions, class battles and wars,” Waters said, struggles that will draw in millions of working people in the United States and around the world.
This new book, she said, helps “arm us for the only battle that can open the door to women’s equality — and a future for humanity — the battle to settle on a world scale which class will rule.” (See text of Waters’ remarks here.)
Hands in the air
Hands shot up in the air when the discussion period began. One member of the audience responded to a point made in the book that “in Africa, Asia, and Latin America the siren song of the commodity fetish is an imperialist weapon like none other.”
She noted that, although women and blacks have made enormous advances through Cuba’s socialist revolution, “today we’re feeling more the influence of digital media, which promotes horrible things like skin-whitening products for women — and men — of African descent. And it’s those who have more money who can afford imported cosmetics, so this also reinforces social inequalities.”
“By the way,” she added, “I call it digital media, not ‘social media,’ because there’s nothing social about it in a positive sense.”
Another participant remarked that the way capitalist cosmetics companies play on the insecurities of women “is not just a racial problem — it has many ramifications. It affects women who are white-complexioned and are told they need these products to erase dark spots on their skin. Or young women who want to look like this or that famous actress. There’s a giant cosmetic surgery industry in Miami, in Colombia and other countries, where they claim they will ‘transform’ you.
“I feel these pressures too, it’s subliminal,” she said. Promoters of so-called beauty products “find ways to insert themselves into your life in order to make more money. For me, what’s important is your spirit, your soul.”
A young woman in the audience said, “Working as a tour guide, I’ve seen women tourists here from the United States who didn’t use cosmetics. Are they more conscious? Is it an act of resistance?”
“That may be true in individual cases,” Waters replied. “But the cosmetics business produces more and more new products all the time, and they even have ‘natural-looking’ cosmetics for women who don’t want to seem to be using makeup. The reality is that, especially in the working class, women — and men — are under pressure to look a certain way, often in order to get and hold a job.
“There is resistance up to a point, but we live under capitalism, and we have to put food on the table for our families.”
All these are class questions, Waters said. And readers will find answers in Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women.
Closing the program, Tomasa González, director of the Loynaz Center, thanked the panelists and recited a poem by Dulce María Loynaz, one of Cuba’s outstanding poets of the mid-20th century. Members of the audience mingled afterward for some time in the patio, where they continued the discussion informally, met the speakers and picked up copies of the book.