AYER, Harriet Hubbard

Born 27 June 1849, Chicago, Illinois; died 23 November 1903, New York, New York

Daughter of Henry George and Juliet Smith Hubbard; married Herbert Copeland Ayer, 1865 (divorced)

Businesswoman, journalist, and popular writer of beauty manuals, Harriet Hubbard Ayer was born to a prominent Chicago family, the third of four children. Considered shy and sickly as a child, minimally educated at a Catholic convent, married at sixteen to the conventional son of a Chicago industrialist, she astonished her society by developing within a few years into one of the city's leading hostesses, renowned for her beauty and for her individuality in flaunting conventions by, for example, inviting actors to her home. Largely self-taught, she early displayed a driving will, a creative personality, and a flair for the dramatic that would enable her later to triumph over a series of severe reversals.

In the early 1880s, left in financial straits by the bankruptcy of her husband and angered by his drinking and infidelities, Ayer defied Victorian conventions by divorcing her husband and, following the example of the many self-made men she had known in Chicago society, establishing her own New York City business, a cosmetic firm. Her chief product was a cream whose formula, she contended, she had bought from a Parisian chemist whose grandfather had originally invented it for the famed Napoleonic beauty, Juliet Récamier. Largely because of her advertising genius in connecting her products with glamourous French traditions of beauty, with her own socialite background, and with stage favorites like Lily Langtry who endorsed her products, for a time her company flourished.

Of mercurial temperament, Ayer was subject to periodic emotional disorders—a condition which led to a probable morphine addiction. In the early 1890s disagreements with family members and especially with a vindictive male business associate were climaxed by her involuntary commitment for 14 months to a mental institution. Although her business and personal life were in shambles, in 1895 she persuaded the editor of the New York World to hire her to write a weekly column of beauty advice. Before long she also joined the reportorial staff, covering murder trials as well as writing exposés of city life, with a primary focus on women.

In her books and columns on beauty, Ayer preached a protofeminist doctrine of attention to health, exercise, and mental discipline as the key to beauty. In an age of feminism and increasing freedom for women, she defined beauty as accessible to any woman who took proper care of her body. Responding to her own psychological difficulties and to the tenets of the 19th century natural health movement, she criticized tight-lacing and other artificial aids to beauty and often rejected the use of the commercial products she once had marketed. She wrote that she was "known world over as a physical culture crank." As a professional woman she wore shortened skirts, masculine suits, and was a member of the Rainy Daisy moderate-dress reform group in New York City. She identified with the working women to whom her columns in the mass circulation World were directed.

Yet Ayer never joined the suffrage movement. She protested that she was not really a dress reformer; she counselled women to wear corsets; and she advocated that older women use cosmetics to disguise their age, thereby furthering modern America's fixation with youth as the epitome of beauty. She cautioned against tanned skin and vigorous exercise for women which might produce well-developed muscles. "The beautiful arm," she wrote, should be "round, white, and plump," and "should taper gently to the hand with an adorable curve at the small delicate wrist." Ayer consistently advocated the conservative position that beauty was a woman's greatest power. She argued that wives needed to pay attention to their looks to keep their husbands and working women to advance in their jobs. These attitudes were the ultimate rationale behind her columns on beauty.

Ayer is an example both of the widespread influence of feminism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of the enduring power of traditional attitudes about women, even among articulate, successful women who had experienced substantial discrimination in their own lives. Her life was unexpectedly cut short in 1903, when she died of pneumonia after a brief illness.

Other Works:

Harriet Hubbard Ayer's Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Law of Health and Beauty (1899). Woman's Guide to Health and Beauty (1904).

Bibliography:

Ayer, M., and I. Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer (1957). Bird, C., Enterprising Women (1976). Hamilton, H., "Harriet Hubbard Ayer" (ms., Chicago Historical Society, n.d.). Kirkland, C., Chicago Yesterdays (1919). Terhune, A., To the Best of My Memory (1930).

—LOIS W. BANNER