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Kate McGregor: "There is only one way to be pretty!" Racialized Beauty Norms in German Samoa, 1906-1916

Though the scholarship on German imperialism largely neglects beauty as a category of analysis, it was an important element of daily colonial life. By underestimating beauty as a tool of power and race, we fail to understand the relationship between the metropole, settler colonial women, and indigenous female populations. Through a transnational and gendered lens, my doctoral dissertation addresses this gap as I analyse the perception, application and consumption of beauty ideals and standards in various cultural settings of the empire. Through the examination of memoirs, colonial novels, advertisements, periodicals, archival documents, and beauty products from 1884 until the start of the Second World War, I argue that beauty was an instrument used by German women to exert power and control in male oriented colonial societies. 
The project proposes that colonial women attempted to solidify their own identity through beauty while relegating the local indigenous women to a lower standing in the racist colonial hierarchy, which was a system based on false racial superiority. Beauty was a weapon during the Imperial German period and highlights the difference between racism as a theory and racism in practice. This conference paper specifically uses the memoir of Frieda Zeieschanl and the colonial periodical, Kolonie und Heimat, to focus on the racialized and gendered colonial social hierarchy of German Samoa, to highlight expectations placed on German colonial women, and local female indigenous population. I argue that by attempting to partake in German beauty standards, German women solidified their identity while relegating indigenous women to a lower standing in the racialized colonial hierarchy. Beauty was a way to exert control over racialized bodies in the colonial sphere.