straddling my chin, I realize it’s her eyes that I’m looking through.
When I got back to the street, I mumbled angry somethings as I looked down at my arm hair. I was so insecure that one little comment about arm hair could make me question the past thirty years of keeping it. I didn’t want to pretend that I didn’t give a shit anymore; I wanted to be like my mom and really not give a shit. As I mulled that over, I went to run some errands. I ended up at Aveda to grab some shampoo. While there, I noticed some dark hairs—like wiry muttonchops—on the face of the lady helping me, and I was thinking: See, Cindy Barshop, she can live with it. Right on! You go, lady with cheek hairs! Empowered hairy ladies rule! Then I went all retroactive on myself and started thinking, But does she know about them? Should I tell her about her cheek hairs? She must want to know about those cheek hairs. I mean, she couldn’t have actually wanted them there, right?
“You want some tea?” she asked.
Aveda gives you free tea.
“No, no,” I said, backing away. “I don’t want tea.”
I managed to keep my mouth shut.
Even though I have weird hairs, I couldn’t help being judgmental about other women’s weird hairs.
I realized that it happens all the time. When I see a lady in the street with a mustache—the same mustache I could easily grow (except for that scarred part that doesn’t grow hair anymore)—the thoughts in my head are so shitty. It goes from Right on, you nonconformist powerful woman to I’ll totally let you borrow ten bucks so that you can take care of that.
I don’t like that my brain does that. I really don’t.
I wondered if I was any better than Muir and Barshop.
When I got back home, I realized how incapable I was of realigning my thoughts. I’d have to be hypnotized or brainwashed to think hairy was okay. The revulsion felt so deep-rooted that I couldn’t help finding the strands more or less … well, yucky.
While people like Muir and Barshop upheld the ideals of hairlessness and maybe even expanded on them (and I would continue to dislike them for that), they didn’t invent them. I took the next couple of days to read some books and studies on hair removal. I wanted to know when and why this idea of hairlessness as an ideal first entered our heads.
I got really into it, blitzing those books with my highlighter. I found out that women’s hair removal isn’t even that old of a practice.
The Europeans were hairy when they came over to America. Hairy colonies. Very hairy colonies. Even up to one hundred years ago, women were letting it all hang naturally.
The hair landscape started changing in the early 1900s, when advertising became national via countrywide-distributed magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Harper’s Bazaar, which, along with touting Crisco and Kleenex, began promoting clean-shaven pits.
At the same time, women’s fashions were also changing. Sleeveless gowns became the rage, and the hemline moved from the ankle up to the mid-calf in 1915, eventually reaching just below the knee in 1927. Women were showing more skin than ever before, which meant they were also showing more hair.
The year 1915 began a period that historian Christine Hope labeled “The Great Underarm Campaign.” This is when advertisers got nasty.
About a dozen companies, including that of King C. Gillette—who less than two decades earlier had come out with the first disposable razor—waged nothing less than full-on character assassination against women with underarm hair. Magazine ads used words to change the connotation, referring to the hair as “objectionable,” “unsightly,” “unwelcome,” “dirty,” and “embarrassing.” On the other hand, hairless women were described as “attractive,” “womanly,” “sanitary,” “clean,” “exquisite,” “modest,” and “feminine.”
Kirsten Hansen, in her 2007 Barnard College senior thesis, “Hair or Bare?”—which would have been salve to my teenage angst had I found it in ninth grade; think The Catcher in the Rye for disgruntled hairy girls—explained that advertisers tried to relate outward cleanliness with inner character. “Advertisers invoked moral values like modesty and cleanliness that had been central to Victorian America,” she wrote, “and linked them to the modern value of exterior beauty.”
I found the ads insanely horrible, yet quite psychologically compelling and to the point.
One, in 1922, raised the pertinent question “Can any woman afford to look masculine?” and followed with this answer: “Positively not! And moreover, there is no excuse for your having a single hair where it should not be.”
The battle against leg hair came next, in a stage that Hope coined as “Coming to Terms with Leg Hair.” Leg-hair removal didn’t catch on quite so quickly, mostly because women could cover up their legs with stockings.
The upper class adopted the trends first, as hairlessness had been marketed as a status symbol, but by the 1930s, the practice had trickled down to the middle class. The hairless-leg deal was sealed during World War II, when stockings became scarce.
These ads made me angry, but for some reason, these ads caught on; they must have spoken to something—an insecurity or a lack or a desire—because they stuck so profoundly.
The idea that leg hair is gross is so ingrained that, as one study I read revealed, during puberty twice as many girls as boys develop a fear of spiders. When asked to describe the spiders, girls more often than not depicted them as “nasty, hairy things.” This happens around the same time they start getting rid of their own body hair. Spiders! Sheesh.
Why did we embrace hairlessness? When I spoke with Jennifer Scanlon, a women’s studies professor at Bowdoin College and the author of Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, she told me that women shouldn’t be seen completely as victims of the advertisers. “Women had a role in this, too,” Scanlon said.
That figured.
She explained that women were searching for something at that time; they wanted self-esteem, sensuality, and independence. “The culture wasn’t offering them these things,” Scanlon explained, “but advertisers did. They said if you remove your armpit hair, you’re going to feel like a sensual being.”
“So,” I said, “you’re saying that instead of hair removal, the advertisers could have just as easily been like, ‘Chicken livers are the answer. Rub these livers all over your body and you will feel sensual.’”
“Yes,” Scanlon said, “it was about filling a need.”
But the ads for leg hair and pit removal weren’t the worst thing I learned.
When I met up with my friend Maggie one morning for coffee and a discussion of my reporting to date, I told her what I perceived to be the worst. “Dude, ladies irradiated themselves to remove hair!”
“What?!” she said.
I’d found out about this in an article written by Rebecca Herzig, a professor of gender studies at Bates College.
When radiation, and more specifically the X-ray, was discovered
