From its inception in 1970, Essence gained its reputation as a provocative Black women’s magazine by celebrating—and marketing—a Black power aesthetic. Its founders and editors hoped to both support the egalitarian society promoted by the revolutionary Black liberation movement and profit from it. But to do so, Essence would need to capture the attention of upwardly mobile Black women—newly empowered by the civil rights and Black power movements— who were willing to reproduce Black social norms and consumption patterns. Essence would then provide advertisers privileged access to the expanding buying power of Black communities. Almost forty years later, Essence is a mainstay within the Black publishing world, despite a number of changes in format, ideology, and ownership. For all the magazine’s cultural importance, however, the role of Essence has often been separated—in the popular imagination, and sometimes by the staff of Essence itself—from its economic foundation and purpose. The editorial section of the magazine consistently tells readers that the magazine is about their empowerment and voice. However, simply browsing the media kit for the magazine reveals Essence to be primarily a “gateway to African American women” for mainstream advertisers. This essay then serves as a case study in the overlap between Black power ideologies and the marketing of Black women to mainstream corporations. The magazine’s history reveals an imperfect resolution for melding its perceived accountability to Black women and its mandate to sell the attention of Black women to multinational corporations.

This essay further examines how the economic assumptions that grounded Essence throughout its first decade shaped the magazine’s relationship to Black feminist editors and contributors, as well as to the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. During this time, the owners sold a controversial stake in the magazine to Playboy, featured articles by Louis Farrakhan, and hired erstwhile blaxploitation director Gordon Parks as artistic director. Essence’s story ultimately demonstrates ways in which shared notions of patriarchy among Black cultural nationalists and the publishers of Essence ultimately allowed them to collaborate in the exploitation of Black women consumers. Yet, as the advertising in Essence transitioned from Afro-wigs and Black power fist combs to mainstream products, such as McDonald’s hamburgers and Maybelline makeup, the magazine’s editorial philosophy also departed from promoting a separatist ideology rooted in Black cultural nationalism to an assimilative ideal of Black consumption.