Facing the Mirror Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture [Paperback]

This innovative, ethnographic study of a neighborhood beauty salon investigates how customers constitute a lively, affirming community of peers during their weekly visits. Facing the Mirrorgives voice to older women, who, in a sexist and ageist society, are frequently devalued and rendered invisible. These older, mostly Jewish women articulate their experiences of bodily self-presentation, femininity, aging, and caring pertaining to their lives within and outside Julie's International Salon. This book explores the socio-moral significance of these experiences which reveals as much about society as about older women themselves. Women's narratives expose structures of power, inequality, and resistance in the ways women perceive reality, make choices and live in their worlds.Frida Kerner Furmanis Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University and is author of BeyondYiddishkeit: The Struggle for Jewish Identity in a ReformSynagogue.