By Sarah Glassford
Posted October 9, 2024
It can be challenging to locate women’s history sources in the archives. They are there… it just isn’t always easy to find them. The same is true of museums. In their book Material Traces of War, museum curators and historians Stacey Barker, Krista Cooke, and Molly McCullough describe a process they call “turning collections on their heads,” in which they examine “objects and documents … originally acquired and catalogued in relation to men’s stories” to discover “buried connections to women’s wartime experiences” (p.5). In their work at the Canadian War Museum, they discovered that many seemingly male-oriented artifacts, photographs, and documents were created, preserved, captioned, and/or donated by women.* Other times, there is gleanable information about women within the content of an item, even if they are not its central concern.
As a computer programmer might say, the multi-faceted nature of archival and museum collections is “a feature, not a bug.” Why? Because it means that traces of people whose lives and experiences were not previously considered significant enough to merit long-term preservation** can often still be found in older collections. In a process similar to what Barker, Cooke, and McCullough describe, many archives are now revisiting their legacy descriptions. By turning collections on their heads, they hope to identify and improve the discoverability of groups like women, children/youth, Indigenous people, Black people, members of the Queer community, and more, in the archival record.
In honour of Women’s History Month, this post turns on its head the Beauty Counselors of Canada fonds (F 0123), held in the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections. This small fonds consists of seven files, containing textual and photographic records produced by or relating to a mid-20th century cosmetics firm headquartered in Windsor, Ontario. Originally saved and acquired for its political and economic significance, when we turn it on its head we find that F 0123 can capably support a very different reading – one that offers insights into women’s history – as well.
Reading #1
“Beauty Counselors of Canada: Men of Business Building Civic Pride in Windsor”
In the early 1960s, Windsor had an image problem. For decades the city’s economic fortunes had risen and fallen in tandem with those of the automobile industry, and the legacy of a bitter nine-month strike by Ford workers in 1945 still lingered. The city was seen by outsiders as a gritty, blue-collar town and a difficult place to do business. A cross-sector group of citizens calling themselves the Greater Windsor Foundation decided to tackle this problem. One initiative they pursued was what today we would call “re-branding”: taking advantage of its rose-friendly climate and soil conditions, Windsor launched rose-planting and marketing campaigns, striving to remake itself as a “City of Roses.”
The Greater Windsor Foundation’s Rose Committee was chaired by a young executive named Doug Johnstone. Johnstone was Sales Promotion Manager at the Windsor headquarters of Beauty Counselors of Canada (BCC), a direct-sales cosmetic company similar to its better-known competitors Avon and Mary Kay. Under Johnstone’s direction, BCC took the lead in promoting Windsor as the City of Roses, creating a “Windsor Rose” product line and making the rose a theme for BCC activities throughout 1964. When the Rose Committee urged Windsorites to plant roses on their property, BCC not only led by example – creating a large rose garden on the front lawn of their corporate office – but also paid for rose planting outside City Hall. Plenty of media coverage followed, as did rose planting around the city. By the later 1960s, Windsor was firmly associated with roses, at least in the minds of locals.
Documents and photographs depicting the campaign and the central parts played in it by Johnstone and BCC were carefully preserved in a BCC scrapbook, retained by Johnstone for decades, and donated by him to the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections in 2014. A 2011 email included with the scrapbook outlined the narrative summarized above, and the way the archives initially arranged and described the contents (emphasizing the products, promotions, tie-in events, media coverage, and wider local business support received) supported this interpretation.
If we read the content and donation context of F 0123 in this way, we come away with an uplifting story of how a group of white, middle-class men banded together to improve Windsor’s civic reputation and, hopefully, improve its attractiveness to new business in the process. The historical significance of the fonds is underlined by the fact that the “Rose City” moniker is still in use sixty years later, even if many residents are no longer clear as to why, and a 2009 pesticide ban led to a massive reduction of the rose beds in city parks.
Reading #2
“Beauty Counselors of Canada: A Window into Women’s Work, Consumption, and Culture”
The modern mass-market cosmetics industry was born in the 1920s and quickly became a consistent part of North American women’s beauty culture, promoted through ubiquitous advertising campaigns. Cosmetics were sold in pharmacies and department stores, but in these settings, women had to buy first and try the products later; they might also be buying from a stranger – potentially a man. In 1929, the California Perfume Company’s “Avon” line introduced a new model of cosmetics sales: direct door-to-door selling by women, to women. Beauty Counselors of Canada used this model as well. Sample kits carried by saleswomen allowed customers to try a product before committing to a purchase, while the saleswoman’s familiarity with her product line and the personal relationships she developed with her clients over repeated sales calls fostered both trust and a degree of customized service. Promotional giveaways rewarded new and repeat customers, while rewards and other company recognitions incentivized saleswomen. Photographs in F 0123 show us the faces of some of these saleswomen, even though they do not tell us their names; promotional brochures give us a glimpse of the products on offer, and the language used to sell them directly to women customers.
The “Windsor Rose” line of products introduced by BCC in 1963-64 fit nicely within its existing product range, which emphasized traditional mid-century notions of white women’s beauty: soft skin, a clear complexion, light and pleasant floral fragrances, shades of peach and pink for lips and cheeks. The decision to use cosmetics as a tool to market a new civic image adds a fascinating female angle to the story: Windsor’s rebranding would worm its way into the public consciousness not only through publicly visible means such as streetside billboards and the new rose gardens in Jackson Park, but also through the very powder in a woman’s handbag, or the colour on her lips. Yet not all women’s bodies were deemed suitable for civic rebranding: BCC’s products do not appear to have been designed for, marketed to, or sold by, women of colour. Since this was also the period in which Windsor’s historically-Black McDougall Street Corridor neighbourhood was dispersed and many of its buildings demolished in the name of downtown revitalization, this is not particularly surprising.
Neither the women customers and female salesforce who comprised the heart of BCC’s operations, nor the larger beauty culture and movement of women into the workforce they were a part of, were mentioned in the 2011 email explaining this scrapbook, or reflected in the original archival arrangement and description of F 0123. Without the connection to the City of Roses campaign, it’s likely that none of the photographs, advertising, or newsletters that shed light on these issues would have been preserved. Beauty culture has always been (and still is) considered frivolous, and the items themselves were ephemeral, meant to be discarded after use. Yet the scrapbook was probably created by a woman working in the BCC headquarters: there is a long history of women as the curators and compilers of family and community memory, and scrapbooking would likely not have been seen as the best use of a young male executive’s working hours. We may imagine, then, that a pair of female hands – likely those of a secretary or other office assistant – was responsible for the neat work of clipping, glueing, labelling, and ordering that turned ephemeral evidence of women’s work and beauty culture into a cohesive testament to men’s civic activism.
How should we arrange and describe the records of Beauty Counselors of Canada, and what story should we use them to tell? To put it more plainly, is the Beauty Counselors of Canada fonds historically significant because it demonstrates the role local businessmen played in improving Windsor’s reputation at a time when the city was viewed as a blue-collar backwater and a difficult place to do business? Or is it historically significant because it provides us with rare glimpses of the entrepreneurial spirit, beauty culture, and memory-curation work done by local women in the 1960s?
The answer, of course, is both. And in conjunction with the creation of this blog post, F 0123 has been redescribed in our archival database in such a way as to highlight its potential as a source for the histories of men’s civic activism and of women’s work and beauty culture.
The archival record contains a multitude of voices, singing alongside and in competition with one another. This is both the joy and the challenge of archives. It also means that archivists and researchers need to develop their skills in recognizing and foregrounding the quieter strains. Ultimately, the more sets of ears we have tuned in to different sonic frequencies, the more songs of human experience – from the ordinary to the extraordinary – we will be able to discern.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Notes:
* For an example of an artifact that can be read in two ways, see the creative and historical project produced by Patricia Calder and Heidi Jacobs, “Jack Calder at War: A Canadian Mother’s World War II Scrapbook” (Windsor: Leddy Library Centre for Digital Scholarship, 2024).
** For decades now, archives have actively sought to preserve records connected with women’s lives and experiences, and there are entire archives devoted to women’s history. We have the “Second Wave” feminists of the 1970s and the culture shift they provoked to thank for that.
The same is true, in Western countries, for records of non-white people other than Indigenous communities (who were in many respects over-documented in government files, as part of the colonizing project, although other factors can still make it difficult to access this information). In the Western world, archives were originally created to preserve the financial and administrative records of governments and powerful institutions, most of which were run by white men. Happily, since the late-20th century archives have embraced a much wider definition of who and what is “significant.”
- - - - - -
Sources:
Barker, Stacey, Krista Cooke, and Molly McCullough. Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914-1945. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of History & University of Ottawa Press, 2021.
Glassford, Sarah. “One Scrapbook, Two Voices: Finding Women in Wartime Artifacts.” In “Jack Calder at War: A Canadian Mother’s World War II Scrapbook.” Windsor: Leddy Library Centre for Digital Scholarship, 2024. https://collections.uwindsor.ca/omeka-s/jack-calder-at-war/about-womens-war-diaries
Hickey, Bill. “City of Roses Label Official.” The Windsor Star (15 March 1967), p. 3.
La Grassa, Jennifer. “Here’s Why Windsor is also known as Rose City.” CBC News (14 February 2022). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-rose-city-valentine-s-day-1.6344390
Manko, Katina. Ding Dong! Avon Calling!: The Women and Men of Avon Products, Incorporated. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
---------------------------------------
Dr. Sarah Glassford has been an archivist in the University of Windsor’s Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections unit since 2019. She is also the Special Collections librarian, a member of the Library Instruction Team, and a historian of modern Canada with a particular interest in women’s history.
Posted October 9, 2024
It can be challenging to locate women’s history sources in the archives. They are there… it just isn’t always easy to find them. The same is true of museums. In their book Material Traces of War, museum curators and historians Stacey Barker, Krista Cooke, and Molly McCullough describe a process they call “turning collections on their heads,” in which they examine “objects and documents … originally acquired and catalogued in relation to men’s stories” to discover “buried connections to women’s wartime experiences” (p.5). In their work at the Canadian War Museum, they discovered that many seemingly male-oriented artifacts, photographs, and documents were created, preserved, captioned, and/or donated by women.* Other times, there is gleanable information about women within the content of an item, even if they are not its central concern.
As a computer programmer might say, the multi-faceted nature of archival and museum collections is “a feature, not a bug.” Why? Because it means that traces of people whose lives and experiences were not previously considered significant enough to merit long-term preservation** can often still be found in older collections. In a process similar to what Barker, Cooke, and McCullough describe, many archives are now revisiting their legacy descriptions. By turning collections on their heads, they hope to identify and improve the discoverability of groups like women, children/youth, Indigenous people, Black people, members of the Queer community, and more, in the archival record.
In honour of Women’s History Month, this post turns on its head the Beauty Counselors of Canada fonds (F 0123), held in the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections. This small fonds consists of seven files, containing textual and photographic records produced by or relating to a mid-20th century cosmetics firm headquartered in Windsor, Ontario. Originally saved and acquired for its political and economic significance, when we turn it on its head we find that F 0123 can capably support a very different reading – one that offers insights into women’s history – as well.
Reading #1
“Beauty Counselors of Canada: Men of Business Building Civic Pride in Windsor”
In the early 1960s, Windsor had an image problem. For decades the city’s economic fortunes had risen and fallen in tandem with those of the automobile industry, and the legacy of a bitter nine-month strike by Ford workers in 1945 still lingered. The city was seen by outsiders as a gritty, blue-collar town and a difficult place to do business. A cross-sector group of citizens calling themselves the Greater Windsor Foundation decided to tackle this problem. One initiative they pursued was what today we would call “re-branding”: taking advantage of its rose-friendly climate and soil conditions, Windsor launched rose-planting and marketing campaigns, striving to remake itself as a “City of Roses.”
The Greater Windsor Foundation’s Rose Committee was chaired by a young executive named Doug Johnstone. Johnstone was Sales Promotion Manager at the Windsor headquarters of Beauty Counselors of Canada (BCC), a direct-sales cosmetic company similar to its better-known competitors Avon and Mary Kay. Under Johnstone’s direction, BCC took the lead in promoting Windsor as the City of Roses, creating a “Windsor Rose” product line and making the rose a theme for BCC activities throughout 1964. When the Rose Committee urged Windsorites to plant roses on their property, BCC not only led by example – creating a large rose garden on the front lawn of their corporate office – but also paid for rose planting outside City Hall. Plenty of media coverage followed, as did rose planting around the city. By the later 1960s, Windsor was firmly associated with roses, at least in the minds of locals.
Documents and photographs depicting the campaign and the central parts played in it by Johnstone and BCC were carefully preserved in a BCC scrapbook, retained by Johnstone for decades, and donated by him to the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections in 2014. A 2011 email included with the scrapbook outlined the narrative summarized above, and the way the archives initially arranged and described the contents (emphasizing the products, promotions, tie-in events, media coverage, and wider local business support received) supported this interpretation.
If we read the content and donation context of F 0123 in this way, we come away with an uplifting story of how a group of white, middle-class men banded together to improve Windsor’s civic reputation and, hopefully, improve its attractiveness to new business in the process. The historical significance of the fonds is underlined by the fact that the “Rose City” moniker is still in use sixty years later, even if many residents are no longer clear as to why, and a 2009 pesticide ban led to a massive reduction of the rose beds in city parks.
Reading #2
“Beauty Counselors of Canada: A Window into Women’s Work, Consumption, and Culture”
The modern mass-market cosmetics industry was born in the 1920s and quickly became a consistent part of North American women’s beauty culture, promoted through ubiquitous advertising campaigns. Cosmetics were sold in pharmacies and department stores, but in these settings, women had to buy first and try the products later; they might also be buying from a stranger – potentially a man. In 1929, the California Perfume Company’s “Avon” line introduced a new model of cosmetics sales: direct door-to-door selling by women, to women. Beauty Counselors of Canada used this model as well. Sample kits carried by saleswomen allowed customers to try a product before committing to a purchase, while the saleswoman’s familiarity with her product line and the personal relationships she developed with her clients over repeated sales calls fostered both trust and a degree of customized service. Promotional giveaways rewarded new and repeat customers, while rewards and other company recognitions incentivized saleswomen. Photographs in F 0123 show us the faces of some of these saleswomen, even though they do not tell us their names; promotional brochures give us a glimpse of the products on offer, and the language used to sell them directly to women customers.
The “Windsor Rose” line of products introduced by BCC in 1963-64 fit nicely within its existing product range, which emphasized traditional mid-century notions of white women’s beauty: soft skin, a clear complexion, light and pleasant floral fragrances, shades of peach and pink for lips and cheeks. The decision to use cosmetics as a tool to market a new civic image adds a fascinating female angle to the story: Windsor’s rebranding would worm its way into the public consciousness not only through publicly visible means such as streetside billboards and the new rose gardens in Jackson Park, but also through the very powder in a woman’s handbag, or the colour on her lips. Yet not all women’s bodies were deemed suitable for civic rebranding: BCC’s products do not appear to have been designed for, marketed to, or sold by, women of colour. Since this was also the period in which Windsor’s historically-Black McDougall Street Corridor neighbourhood was dispersed and many of its buildings demolished in the name of downtown revitalization, this is not particularly surprising.
Neither the women customers and female salesforce who comprised the heart of BCC’s operations, nor the larger beauty culture and movement of women into the workforce they were a part of, were mentioned in the 2011 email explaining this scrapbook, or reflected in the original archival arrangement and description of F 0123. Without the connection to the City of Roses campaign, it’s likely that none of the photographs, advertising, or newsletters that shed light on these issues would have been preserved. Beauty culture has always been (and still is) considered frivolous, and the items themselves were ephemeral, meant to be discarded after use. Yet the scrapbook was probably created by a woman working in the BCC headquarters: there is a long history of women as the curators and compilers of family and community memory, and scrapbooking would likely not have been seen as the best use of a young male executive’s working hours. We may imagine, then, that a pair of female hands – likely those of a secretary or other office assistant – was responsible for the neat work of clipping, glueing, labelling, and ordering that turned ephemeral evidence of women’s work and beauty culture into a cohesive testament to men’s civic activism.
How should we arrange and describe the records of Beauty Counselors of Canada, and what story should we use them to tell? To put it more plainly, is the Beauty Counselors of Canada fonds historically significant because it demonstrates the role local businessmen played in improving Windsor’s reputation at a time when the city was viewed as a blue-collar backwater and a difficult place to do business? Or is it historically significant because it provides us with rare glimpses of the entrepreneurial spirit, beauty culture, and memory-curation work done by local women in the 1960s?
The answer, of course, is both. And in conjunction with the creation of this blog post, F 0123 has been redescribed in our archival database in such a way as to highlight its potential as a source for the histories of men’s civic activism and of women’s work and beauty culture.
The archival record contains a multitude of voices, singing alongside and in competition with one another. This is both the joy and the challenge of archives. It also means that archivists and researchers need to develop their skills in recognizing and foregrounding the quieter strains. Ultimately, the more sets of ears we have tuned in to different sonic frequencies, the more songs of human experience – from the ordinary to the extraordinary – we will be able to discern.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Notes:
* For an example of an artifact that can be read in two ways, see the creative and historical project produced by Patricia Calder and Heidi Jacobs, “Jack Calder at War: A Canadian Mother’s World War II Scrapbook” (Windsor: Leddy Library Centre for Digital Scholarship, 2024).
** For decades now, archives have actively sought to preserve records connected with women’s lives and experiences, and there are entire archives devoted to women’s history. We have the “Second Wave” feminists of the 1970s and the culture shift they provoked to thank for that.
The same is true, in Western countries, for records of non-white people other than Indigenous communities (who were in many respects over-documented in government files, as part of the colonizing project, although other factors can still make it difficult to access this information). In the Western world, archives were originally created to preserve the financial and administrative records of governments and powerful institutions, most of which were run by white men. Happily, since the late-20th century archives have embraced a much wider definition of who and what is “significant.”
- - - - - -
Sources:
Barker, Stacey, Krista Cooke, and Molly McCullough. Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914-1945. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of History & University of Ottawa Press, 2021.
Glassford, Sarah. “One Scrapbook, Two Voices: Finding Women in Wartime Artifacts.” In “Jack Calder at War: A Canadian Mother’s World War II Scrapbook.” Windsor: Leddy Library Centre for Digital Scholarship, 2024. https://collections.uwindsor.ca/omeka-s/jack-calder-at-war/about-womens-war-diaries
Hickey, Bill. “City of Roses Label Official.” The Windsor Star (15 March 1967), p. 3.
La Grassa, Jennifer. “Here’s Why Windsor is also known as Rose City.” CBC News (14 February 2022). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-rose-city-valentine-s-day-1.6344390
Manko, Katina. Ding Dong! Avon Calling!: The Women and Men of Avon Products, Incorporated. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
---------------------------------------
Dr. Sarah Glassford has been an archivist in the University of Windsor’s Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections unit since 2019. She is also the Special Collections librarian, a member of the Library Instruction Team, and a historian of modern Canada with a particular interest in women’s history.
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