Though it is often said that beauty ideals are eternal, historians have made it clear that beauty has a history. Lois Banner published the first major chronicle of US beauty ideals in 1983, and demonstrated that beauty ideals are products of their times. Blondes supplanted brunettes as beauty ideals, and svelte flappers took the place of corseted and curvy women. The historical scholarship of beauty published in the 1980s purported to be about women in general but was largely silent on issues of race. Though they rarely named whiteness, these histories presented accounts of white women's lives and white beauty ideals.

Scholarship on African American women and beauty began to appear in the 1990s and 2000s. A cluster of books, among them Noliwe Rooks's Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women (1996), my own Ain't I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race (2002), and Tiffany Gill's Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (2010), focussed on the meaning of beauty practices, beauty ideals, and beauty work in African American women's lives. Race was a fundamental category of analysis in these works. Telling the story of African American lives and institutions meant writing about racism, resistance to white supremacy, and the course of antiracist social movements.

With the notable exceptions of Kathy Peiss's Hope in a Jar (2011) and Karen Tice's recent Queens of Academe (2012), historical work that considered beauty in the context of white women's lives paid scant attention to race. Blain Robert joins Peiss and Tice in recognizing that race profoundly shaped the meaning of beauty for both black and white women. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, from census data to a beautician's appointment book to oral histories and advertisements, Roberts shows that race was as central to southern white communities' engagement with beauty as it was to black communities.

Beauty pageants have had a large place in twentieth-century southern culture, and southern women have had a disproportionate role in US beauty contests. Roberts asked how a conservative region of the country began to excel in the display of women's bodies. She found southern beauty contests' unlikely roots in competitions to give ribbons to the plumpest pigs and largest crops at local fairs. These contests paved the way for better-baby contests in which cute babies were celebrated as products of superlative mothering. Not long after fairgoers became accustomed to judging babies' bodies, agricultural boards established beauty contests for young women, linking the contests to the promotion of commodities. Just as a cute baby could stand in for conservative family ideals, a woman in a bathing suit could represent wholesome rural life when crowned a Tobacco Queen or Maid of Cotton.

Roberts argues that the images of these queens travelled nationaly and accomplished a great deal of ideological work. Tobacco and cotton farm labor was anything but pretty. It was backbreaking labor performed by black workers for pitifully low wages. White, healthy, carefree beauty queens presented a fanciful image of southern agriculture and of the South. Beauty contests associated with fruits, vegetables, and fibers of all sorts spread throughout the South and built a beauty contest infrastructure that prepared white southern women to compete in pageants at the national level. It is well known that until 1983 every Miss America winner had been white. Roberts importantly demonstrates that the image celebrated in Miss America was not only white, but also southern. White southern women dominated the Miss America contest. Year after year America's ideal woman came from the South. Moreover, Roberts notes that the height of the pageant's popularity, when it drew the largest national television audiences, coincided with the most infamous battles of the civil rights movement. In the same television season northern viewers watched whites' vicious responses to black attempts to racially integrate schools and white southern beauty queens held up as the embodiment of American ideals. Just as earlier commodity queens put a pretty face on southern agriculture, southern white beauty queens obscured the ugliness of white southern resistance.

Pageants, Parlors, & Pretty Women sets out to connect black and white women's beauty histories. The organization of the book, which alternates between chapters devoted to black and white women, works against thinking about the histories as intertwined. The chapters regarding the meaning of beauty in black women's lives, while well written and well documented, draw heavily on existing scholarship. The book's most important contribution is the way in which Roberts situates the tradition of southern white beauty queens in its racial and commercial context. Roberts makes a major contribution by showing the centrality of the symbol of the chaste and beautiful white woman to white supremacy in the South.