As historian Lucy Jane Santos has recently noted of the May 1912 suffrage march, “there was a great deal of interest in what the women were wearing by the press and a great deal of planning by the organizers.” In other words, were women boasting crimson mouths, it would have been written about in the press at the time. Santos explains, “Whilst the reports may have varied on how successful the march was in terms of rallying people to their cause, there is one thing that all of them have in common. Absolutely no mention of lipstick, red or otherwise.”
How would such a myth proliferate? Blame Elizabeth Arden. Not Elizabeth Arden the person—otherwise known as Florence Graham, pioneer of American beauty culture—but Elizabeth Arden the powerhouse brand that has circulated the myth.
What we do know is that, in 1912, Graham joined the New York rally, shocking staff at her 5th Avenue boutique. Having previously scoffed at feminist gusto, the enterprising Welsh-Canadian businesswoman likely saw the suffrage movement as a sure way to rub shoulders with the white, educated, Protestant elite, a group which she was both desperate to infiltrate and cater to in her tony skincare “salons.”
As Santos points out, Graham’s 5th Avenue flagship store had only been open two years at the time of the 1912 suffrage march, and even though “cosmetic use had gained in popularity and acceptability in Europe … it was very much not a thing in New York.”
About a century later, as femvertising came to dominate the beauty industry, twentieth-century revisionism followed suit. What better way to encourage women to embrace a brand—or a lipstick shade—than to link it to a right that virtually all Western women cherish, whether or not they call themselves feminists? After all, if you’re already apt to feel powerful wearing red lipstick, how much more powerful will you feel if you reckon yourself a suffragist who brazenly took to the streets?
While this fantasy is seductive, it obscures the much more complicated history of lipstick, feminism, and the so-called “lipstick feminism” of the late twentieth century. Revisionism infuses the past with today’s fashionable ideology. It can also hold the past to unfair scrutiny among those who already know how everything turned out.
Was Elizabeth Arden an ardent feminist? No. Did she give out red lipstick to the masses? Almost certainly not. Has this legend made the brand a lot of money? Unquestionably.