Hope in a Jar

Kathy Peiss' work is always exhaustively researched and engagingly written, with clear arguments and structures. In this, it already stands head and shoulders above the bulk of cultural history written. In addition, this book, *as a straight history text* is also interesting and accessible to the lay reader. Some might argue that Peiss gives too much credence to the community-building possibilities of makeup culture, but I believe this is not the case. Rather, Peiss is taking on a time-honored and by now orthodox view of the history of women. You know the drill: women are victims; women inhabit a world made by men; women have had no pure means by which to just _be women_. To put it crudely. Peiss' history on the other hand focuses on this industry, makeup, which has been decried by many as a tool of patriarchy, and shows that in fact women made the world of makeup, even if they may have done so for the sake of looking better for men (and that's not the whole story either.) EVEN IF the community of fashion doesn't have the historical pedigree of the WWW or UAW, ILGWU, etcetera, it may well be because Labor was a self-consciously political movement, with a bent for public promotion. Makeup, by these standards, is just makeup.Give the historians a break. They (we) can't exist in some ideologicial vacuum. Peiss' work does a service for the discipline of history in that her ideological stance is healthily skeptical of many (though by no means all) orthodoxies, and her careful writing and exhaustive research are great examples of how to write good history about heretofore ignored subjects.Bottom line, folks. Peiss is never a surprising read, because her research and writing make each point seem glaringly obvious. But the strength of her observations and the clarity of her argument make this a solid piece of work indeed.