Over on one of my other blogs I mentioned that I’ve been trying to identify the provenance of some photographs from the Spanish civil war including this one of a group of Milicianas, young women republican soldiers

The young woman on the right is clearly wearing lipstick, which is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Spanish civil war, but it’s not that surprising.

While before the first world war, middle class young women did not use cosmetics, or if they did, very discreetly, as the more obvious use of cosmetics was associated with cabaret dancers and actresses.

Louise Bryant, who later married the revolutionary John Reed, caused a stir in rural Oregon, when as a school teacher, she wore powder and perfume

and as can be seen in this later picture, lipstick.

So why lipstick?

A lot of it is to do with the first world war. Sociologically, the reasons are quite complex, but young middle class women began to replace men in some jobs and became more liberated with their own incomes as a consequence, and of course in a number of countries the absolutely horrific death toll of the war led to a shortage of eligible young men, because, to quote Olivia Coleman’s character in Mothering Sunday, ‘they’re all fucking dead’.

This of course meant that young women inevitably began to compete with each other to secure a ‘nice young man’.

Some didn’t of course – if you look back into your family history you’ll almost certainly find some female relatives who you would have expected to be married in the 1920s who weren’t.

And if one looks at photographs of the time you notice the increased use of lipstick.

It could be put down to the influence of the growth of cinema, but it’s probably more the case that cinema, and female movie stars, reflect reality.

Now there’s been some research on the increased use of powder compacts by young women in the 1920’s and 30s, and certainly when I was documenting the contents of Dow’s Pharmacy for the National Trust, I came across quite a few powder compact refills that I would date to the 1930s on stylistic grounds

There were also quite a few lipsticks, but almost all were from after World War Two

While some were locally made, quite a few were imported, and that may be why I found few if any from the inter war period – shortages meant that they were all used, and few if any survived. It’s notable that after World War Two, Australian industry started producing replacement cosemetic products to replace imported ones.

I must confess I havn’t found any scholarly research on the use of lipstick in the 1920s and 30s, but both newspapers and photographs of the time show that lipstick was clearly being used by young women in England, France and America.

And the young woman soldier in the original picture?

One tends to think of pre Republican early twentieth century Spain as backward and repressed, but the Spanish cosmetics company Puig started making lipstick in 1922, and hand wavingly, I would guess that in the cities young women would have access to the fashion magazines of the time and see movie stars wearing make up and wish to copy the look, so it’s more that possible that by the 1930s young women in the cities routinely wore makeup and lipstick …