Brown beauty: color, sex, and race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women's status in the modern nation.

This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms.

Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this text analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women's social history.

It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class.