as reversals or confusions of one’s own sex role. Sexual deviance was defined largely by the observation of “virile” traits or habits among women or “effeminate” traits or habits among men. Early sexologists in Europe and North America thus focused on the observation of such traits and habits in individuals, enumerating and categorizing their case reports into various types of sexual “inversion.”62 The most influential sexologists of the late nineteenth century—Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Albert Moll—concentrated these observations on “secondary sexual characteristics.” Secondary sexual characteristics, Krafft-Ebing explained, were those “bodily and psychical” traits, such as facial hair or breasts, that develop “only during the period of puberty” and help “differentiate the two sexes.”63
Of course, the very concept of secondary sexual characteristics implied the possibility of slippage between “primary” and “secondary” identifications, and sexologists readily acknowledged the myriad difficulties of aligning the two. Sexologists further determined that inversions, forms of sexual deviance, were often subtle, complex, and even contradictory. “Observation teaches that the pure type of the man or the woman is often enough missed by nature,” Krafft-Ebing wrote, “that is to say that certain secondary male characteristics are found in woman and vice versa.” Examples might include “men with an inclination for female occupations (embroidery, toilet, etc.)” and “women with a decided predilection for manly sports.”64 The complexities of sexual classifications were amplified, sexologists believed, by racial variation in secondary sexual characteristics: “The higher the anthropological development of the race, the stronger these contrasts between man and woman, and vice versa.”65 As sexologists sought to distinguish the truly “pathological” inversion from a mild fondness for embroidery or boxing, sorting genuinely “feminine” characteristics from the “masculine” became paramount.
Body hair, considered one of the leading secondary sex characteristics, presented particular challenges to this effort. To begin, hair growth was troublingly unpredictable, varying from individual to individual, from life stage to life stage, and from season to season. Moreover, hair’s connection to sexual inversion remained uncertain, even as sexologists meticulously examined patients’ bodies for signs of “unusual” hair growth.66 The clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, assessing the body hair of more than 500 men, claimed a link between sexual roles and relative amounts of hair. He determined that the beards of 132 of the “inverted” men in his study were “‘sparser than in average men’”; another 98 “had no body hair at all, 78 had unusually fine body hair, and 176 had body hair less dense than in average males.”67 Those findings were disputed by Krafft-Ebing, whose scrutiny of the face, trunk, pubic region, and extremities found no similar correspondence between hairiness and inversion.68 For Krafft-Ebing, it was less hair itself than attitudes toward hair that indicated sexual abnormality. To illustrate the point, Krafft-Ebing described the case of a “silent, retiring, un-social, and sullen” man who arrived at an asylum at the age of twenty-three. Over his years in the institution, “his personality became completely feminine.”69 Along with a request for women’s clothing and a transfer to the female wing of the hospital (where he might find protection from “men that wished to violate him”), the patient demanded the application of an “‘Oriental Hair-Remover’” in order that “no one may doubt” his true sex. For Krafft-Ebing, the patient’s manifest distaste for his own body hair, rather than his relative degree of pilosity, was the real indication of “deviance.”70
As equivocal as they were on the relationship between body hair and male sexual inversion, early sexologists were equally mystified by hair’s relationship to female inversion. Some insisted that hair growth in a “masculine” pattern suggested a deeper confusion of sexual role; others reported that women with flowing beards tended to exhibit exemplary “feminine” characteristics in all other respects. The most influential and authoritative sexologist in America in the 1890s, British physician Havelock Ellis, reflected this wider ambivalence about the meanings of hair. Ellis, an honorary member of the Chicago Academy of Medicine, member of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, and vice president of the International Medical and Legal Congress of New York, confronted the relations between hairiness and female sexuality directly in his first American publication. In 1895, he declared it “a mistake to suppose that bearded women approach the masculine type,” particularly because female inverts may appear without “any trace of a beard or moustache.”71 Two years later, however, Ellis revisited that confident assertion, allowing that one of the female inverts he had studied did indeed have an “unusual growth of hair on the legs.” Writing in the first English-language medical textbook on the subject of sexual inversion, he further proposed that “[a] woman physician in the United States, who knows many inverts of her own sex, tells me that she has observed this growth of hair on the legs.”72 Whether visibly hairy legs or upper lips indicated female deviance remained open to debate.
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