I am delighted to have Stacy Cordery back for another round of three, or in this case four, questions and an answer.

At Iowa State University, Stacy A. Cordery is a professor of History and the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies. In addition to the modern U.S. survey, she teaches the Gilded Age, the History of First Ladies, and the Historical Methods course. Cordery is the president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era (SHGAPE), a board member for the First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE ), and an advisor to the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson, North Dakota. She has addressed groups of all sorts and sizes, on-line and off, from platforms which included NPR, the History Channel, Smithsonian TV, Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN, and C-SPAN, and at venues ranging from the Wilson Center and the National Constitution Center to her local library. Her five books include biographies of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Juliette Gordon Low, as well as her newest biography, Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire.

Take it away, Stacy!

What path led you to Elizabeth Arden? And why do you think it is important to tell her story today?

As with so many authors, the path to this topic was a combination of personal and professional. As a young teen, my mom and I spent a marvelous mother-daughter day at an Elizabeth Arden salon where we learned all about skin care and makeup from gorgeous Arden experts. It was all very hands on and totally fun. I still have the jar of Eight Hour Cream from that day, and it still has its utterly unique color and–for me—Proustian scent. As a classroom professor and a woman’s biographer, it had been clear to me for years that female entrepreneurs are largely missing from history. Most of us can name at least a handful of Gilded Age or Progressive Era captains of industry (or robber barons; take your pick). But few of us teach our students about women of vision and grit who overcame the odds in the overwhelmingly masculine world of business. In seeking a topic acceptable to my agent and to my editor at Viking/Penguin, it dawned on me how very little I knew about the woman whose ideas and guidance had given my mother and me such a memorable day.

I learned that Elizabeth Arden’s is a rags-to-riches immigrant success story—not unlike John Jacob Astor’s or Andrew Carnegie’s. Because she was a woman, however, she lacked a network, access to bank loans, a mentor, or even a wife to aid in the varied and critical ways wives have always helped their businessmen husbands. Arden began with little beyond fierce determination. She wanted to help women to a greater inner and outer beauty so that they could feel good about themselves, project internal strength, and attain their goals. In the process, she brought about a cultural sea change when she overrode the deep social taboo against cosmetics. She successfully introduced makeup to America with her minimalist and sophisticated “Arden Look.” She originated the first holistic beauty system, which included healthy skin, physical fitness, mental well-being, a nutritious diet, and flattering clothes for all occasions. Arden wasn’t just ahead of the curve, she had a genius for creating it. For nearly six decades she was the premier innovator in the prestige fashion and beauty industries. She built—from scratch and in an extraordinarily short time—a global beauty empire. She ran it as owner and CEO, redefining customer loyalty as her loyalty to her clients. She built the first luxury beauty spa, Maine Chance, which became the destination for celebrities, royalty, and the wealthy from all walks of life. In the process, she hired and promoted countless women, discovered and launched influential couturiers such as Charles James and Oscar de la Renta, and began innovative newspaper, magazine, radio, and television advertising campaigns to reach ever broader swaths of consumers. Elizabeth Arden was also a patriotic contributor to the Allied effort in World War II, an inventor, and a philanthropist, who built a winning thoroughbred racing stable on the side! Her life was fascinating and instructive, and including this successful female entrepreneur enriches the historical record in critically important ways.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about Arden doing historical research for your work?

The most surprising thing may have been how truly self-taught and self-driven she was, and yet how successful. Elizabeth Arden was born in poverty in rural Canada. She never graduated high school, let alone business school. She had an unshakeable faith that she understood women’s desires. She knew that she knew more about her clientele, her products, her industry, and how to run her company than anyone else. She made so much money and methodically rose up the social ranks that her name became a synonym for luxury. How? Where did that conviction originate? She was occasionally wrong, but not often! Elizabeth Arden was by far the most self-certain individual I have ever studied.
If I can add the most admirable thing I learned about Arden, it would be all of her amazing accomplishments during World War II. Her efforts were generous, sincere, and motivated by a deep patriotism. She loved working with the women’s auxiliaries in the U.S. military, particularly the Women Marines. She aided recruitment, designed the color Montezuma Red for products such as lipstick and nail polish to match their uniforms, and loved every visit to a base where she could mingle with the WRs. Elizabeth Arden teamed up with Kappa Kappa Gamma to create, stock, and pay for makeup bars at Women’s Service Centers—what an incredible story!

Elizabeth Arden lived a very different life than the subjects of your earlier biographies of influential women, Juliette Gordon Low and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Were there similarities that surprised you? 

It is true that on the face of it, those are three very different women! But all of them devoted their lives to their own “passion projects,” and while they were certainly unalike, all three operated on behalf of a larger population: women (Arden), girls and women (Low), the U.S. democracy (Longworth). Plus, all three were single-minded in their commitment and utterly convinced of the rightness of their cause. Arden, who at the time had one salon and was doing it all—from staffing the front desk to providing treatments to sweeping up—nevertheless started by advertising in Vogue, which was even then was national and aimed at elites! Juliette Gordon Low famously began, when there were exactly zero Girl Scouts, by stating that she had “something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we’re going to start it tonight!” Longworth worked mostly behind the scenes, but for sixty years the nation’s most powerful leaders sought her opinion. And of course, the similarity that mattered to me as their biographer is that all three intriguing women deserve to be better known.

Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?

I’m at the end of my career, and I will speak frankly. Misogyny exists. It is (often but not always) subterranean, persistent, harmful, and costly. It is debilitating to everyone, including misogynists. Women’s History Month at the very least gives us a rationale to shine the spotlight for one short period on women, without too much blowback. Women’s History Month has been going on in some fashion since the 1980s. It has generally been an uncontroversial thing on the calendar—that is, until very recently I have not been aware of protests against the idea. I do think Women’s History Month is important. These 31 dedicated days mean that we can educate ourselves and deepen our corporate understanding of women’s nuanced and complicated histories. While perhaps a small thing in the ancient and often overwhelming presence of misogyny, I believe it is worthwhile to continue to set aside March to focus, to learn, to remember, to caution, to inspire. As Hillary Clinton wrote in Something Lost, Something Gained, “We need to understand women’s history (and all our history) to better secure our rights and fight for the ones we’ve lost or have yet to gain.” (p. 293)

A question from Stacy: I love libraries and librarians, archives and archivists. Tell us about a time when an archivist made all the difference! 

One subject I wrote about in Women Warriors,  was the role supportive fathers played in the creation of women who fought. I wanted to move the story beyond the past to the modern world. I had plenty of anecdotal evidence about women following their fathers into the military, but I really wanted some hard data.

I was spending a lot of time at the Pritzer Military Library, which was then located in downtown Chicago. When I asked the chief librarian, Teri Embry, if she had any ideas about where I could find the information, she grinned, held up a finger and walked away. She came back with a large book, West Point’s Annual Register of Graduates for 2010, and flipped to the genealogical succession table, which listed every West Point graduate from 1802 to 2010 who was a descendant (or ancestor) of another West Point graduate. Beginning with the class of 1980, every graduating class has included women who are the daughters, granddaughters, nieces, sisters and in one case great-great granddaughter of former cadets. I would never have found that source without Teri’s help.

After that I regularly turned to Teri and her reference staff when I ran into questions for both Women Warriors and The Dragon From Chicago, or when I found it difficult to get my hands on a source. During Covid, they were a lifesaver.

It broke my heart when the library moved to Wisconsin.

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Interested in learning more about Stacy and her work?

Check out her website: https://www.stacycordery.com/

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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Olivia Campbell, author of Sisters in Science.