The Bustelo affair

“Cosmetics, Fashions and the Exploitation of Women” is a somewhat unusual book, published by Pathfinder (the publishing arm of the Socialist Workers Party or SWP). The SWP is a small Marxist party in the United States. It used to be in political solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, but is now a completely independent group. Pathfinder publishes both SWP-centered material, and material about Cuba or South Africa which may be of broader interest.

This book deals with the so-called Bustelo affair or Bustelo controversy, which raged within the SWP back in 1954. The controversy started when a mysterious writer named Jack Bustelo wrote an article in SWP's newspaper The Militant attacking cosmetics and the “beauty” industry as a capitalist profit-making scheme perpetuating the oppression of women. Bustelo later turned out to be none other than SWP leader Joe Hansen! The article, “Sagging cosmetic lines try a face lift”, triggered angry and confused responses from some SWP members, who argued that working class women had the right to use cosmetics, wanted to use them, and that Marxists should support women getting them . The debate continued internally within the party even after The Militant had put an end to the public controversy. It soon touched upon broader issues, such as anthropology and matriarchy.

Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed (the SWP house expert on anthropology) defended the traditional Marxist position, arguing that contemporary standards of “beauty” are rooted in capitalist competition, oppression of women and racism. Women haven't always used cosmetics, and a socialist society would create new standards of beauty. Working class fighters will be seen as beautiful! Reed also wrote an extensive article defending the idea that primitive society was classless and matriarchal. Hansen's and Reed's main opponent in the debate, Marjorie McGowan (who is otherwise unknown), took a somewhat different position: “The long-stemmed American beauty, full of natural vitality and physical grace, with shining hair, clear eyes, smooth skin, and natural cosmetics with a trace of accent here and there, is no fiction but an American commonplace. This type of beauty is the American social standard, whatever Bustelo might think of it”. Reed, not without foundation, called this the standard of the Nordic hero, the female white supremacist. (As a sidepoint, “Bustelo” is apparently a strong black coffee popular among Puerto Ricans and Cubans in New York City. Hansen happened to like it, but perhaps his pseudonym was also intended to be an anti-racist marker.)

While none of the participants were “feminists” in the strict sense of that term, the Bustelo affair could be seen as an early example of a controversy over feminism within a Marxist party. Ironically, the orthodox Marxists Hansen-Bustelo and Reed sound more “feminist” than their critics, who had a positive view of cosmetics or long-stemmed American beauties. Even more ironically, the anti-feminist critics of Hansen and Reed were all women!

While Marjorie McGowan's articles sound less extreme if read in their entirety, it's nevertheless obvious that she was a “complementarian” and “essentialist” in her view of gender and gender roles (really a conservative position). She rejects Marxist dogma, but is equally dogmatic in her appeals to “science” as the neutral arbiter of all questions. Reed has little problem showing that McGowan's “science” is anything but neutral, and often dead wrong. As already pointed out, the idea that women “want” to be “beautiful” and hence “need” cosmetics is really a social construct from the American post-war boom. Just 50 years earlier, cosmetics were the marks of a prostitute and honorable women were *not* supposed to apply it! Nor was it hard for Reed to show that standards of beauty have changed considerably over the centuries. So have gender roles. There is nothing “natural” about female sex competition for men, the underlying premise of cosmetics. For instance, among many animals, it's rather the males that compete for females (Reed doesn't mention peacocks, but that would be the classical example).

Reed is on shakier ground when she attempts to prove that matriarchy (or rather her peculiar interpretation of it) was the first human society. Here, McGowan convincingly shows that there isn't a simple historical sequence matriarchy-patriarchy. Nor is there a simple correlation between matriarchy and a classless society, or between patriarchy and classes. Ancient human societies were incredibly diverse. Australian Aboriginals had no classes, didn't care about fatherhood but were extremely patriarchal anyway. Ancient Egypt was “matriarchal” and yet a hierarchical society based on slave labor. Reed's response is to simply appeal, dogmatically, to Friedrich Engels and Lewis Henry Morgan (an anthropologist whose works Engels used as authoritative sources), and cast everyone who disagrees as anti-Marxist. There simply *must* be a clear historical sequence from matriarchy to patriarchy, or else the bourgeois scientists are right, and that's apparently unbearable. It should be noted that the SWP didn't officially endorse Reed's analyses, but since she could publish them in the party's public press, they nevertheless acquired a kind of quasi-imprimatur. As for McGowan, she left the SWP shortly afterwards, and it's not clear what happened to her (or how she felt being attacked in SWP material decades later). I'm not a Marxist, but I would say that Jack Bustelo and Evelyn Reed “won” the debate as a whole, despite Reed loosing the last round to the long-stemmed Aryan blonde from Los Angeles…

A controversy over feminist-related issues in 1954 strikes many people as strange (the feminist movement didn't become strong until decades later), and there are inevitably many rumors concerning this debate. Everyone seems to agree that Hansen knew very well what kind of reactions his hit piece on cosmetics would elicit. His article was a deliberate provocation intended to expose and smoke out the anti-Marxist elements within the party. Some believe that the Bustelo affair had something to do with a factional conflict between the SWP leadership and a dissident group around Murry Weiss and Myra Tanner Weiss, who accused the SWP of pandering to male chauvinism. (Hansen was accused by some angry critics of poking fun at women who use make up, or perhaps women in general.) Finally, some people on the far left believe that Hansen deliberately started the Bustelo controversy in order to avoid a more important political discussion about Bolivia, where a Trotskyist party had just “betrayed” a revolution! Hansen is said to have gone into seclusion for several months, and when he finally emerged, it was with an attack on cosmetics intended as a diversionary maneuver…

However, I think “Cosmetics, Fashions and the Exploitation of Women” stands on its own. Indeed, it seems to be one of Pathfinder's bestsellers, and has been translated to both Spanish and Farsi. The issues it raises are forever new. What is the relationship between Marxism or science, indeed, any political philosophy and science? Can science be a neutral arbiter? Are gender roles (or beauty ideals) “natural” or socially constructed? Are women-related issues such as cosmetics really less important than Bolivian revolutions?

I'll close with this quotation from Hegel (cited by Bustelo), which has a certain relevance to the “culture wars” of the present day: “Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is done with anyone who does not agree. He has just to explain that he has no more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same as himself. In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realization of a community of conscious life. What is antihuman, the condition of mere animals, consists in keeping within the sphere of feeling pure and simple, and in being able to communicate only by way of feeling-states”.

Amen.