Soft Rejuvenation: Cosmetics, Idealized White Femininity, and Young Women’s Bodies, 1880–1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article we draw together the histories of rejuvenation and cosmetic use in order to examine discourses of “soft rejuvenation” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While rejuvenation has typically been considered in relation to transnational medicalized attempts to restore youthful vitality and virility, we suggest that the logic of rejuvenation was feminized through the promotion of cosmetic and daily self-care regimens in this period. Drawing on material from British, American, and Canadian contexts relating to beauty and hygiene, we suggest that daily practices of caring for and disciplining the white female body, especially through cosmetic use, were legitimated, in part, using the rhetoric of rejuvenation. The article considers how the transnational, the modern, and the propagation of whiteness in the early twentieth century were mobilized in these ideas of how daily bodily work could preserve the (white) youthful face and body, which was understood to embody health and vigor. This discourse was significant for young women, who were subject to male control over their bodies as they began to be employed in nontraditional workplaces; however, we also argue that these cosmetic practices can be understood as a component of girls’ and women’s own self-fashioning of modern identities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".