A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life

Amazon.com Price: $32.50 (as of 12/04/2019 03:25 PST- Details)

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Description

Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature–Eliza Potter’s 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life. Potter was once a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was once in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe rich white women–and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati’s gossip columnists on the time. But more essential is Potter’s portrait of herself as a wage-earning woman, proud of her work, who earned high pay and accumulated somewhat a bit of money as one of the crucial nation’s earliest “beauticians” at a time when most black women worked on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Because her work offered insights into the private lives of elite white women, Potter carved out a literary space that featured a black working woman on the center, moderately than on the margins, of the era’s transformations in gender, race, and class structure. Xiomara Santamarina provides an insightful introduction to this edition that includes newly found out details about Potter, discusses the creator’s strong satirical voice and proud working-class status, and places the narrative in the context of nineteenth-century literature and history.

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