or unguents, marketed under signature labels: Trent’s Depilatory, Hubert’s Roseate Powder, Dr. Gouraud’s Poudres Subtile. Colley’s Depilatory was said to entail a mixture of “quicklime and sulphuret of potass.” Devereux’s Depilatory Powder could be purchased wholesale in New York City. Dillingham and Bicknell offered a “Chinese Hair Eradicator and Depilatory Powder” to shoppers in Augusta, Maine.
The sale of these goods, like that of other patent remedies, established networks of marketing and distribution later followed by manufacturers of soaps, cigarettes, and other commodities.25 In the antebellum period, the word “patent” was used to refer to any preparation whose availability was extended through advertising—whether or not it possessed an actual government patent. Patent hair removers were distributed through wholesalers like druggists (who ordered in bulk and redistributed material to middle men) and through the apothecaries, physicians, barbers, and perfumers who sold goods directly to users.26 Antebellum circulars, catalogues, and advertisements indicate that numerous manufacturers of patent depilatories delivered their products to consumers through a variety of strategies. One crucial factor in the development of national markets in such commodities was their relative transportability, historian James Harvey Young has shown, as shipping costs for patent medicines represented a smaller proportion of their total price than of heavier, bulkier commodities.27 Even before the development of the transnational highways and railways that expedited industrial growth, lightweight powders and pastes could be hauled by riverboat or railroad, by foot or horse-drawn wagon. Competing fiercely with one another, larger companies might have a dozen or more distributors on the road at one time, each covering a particular district. Such efforts appear to have been successful; by the end of the Civil War, few domestic manuals contained recipes for homemade depilatories. Those troubled by facial hair would turn instead to packaged compounds such as Trent’s, Devereux’s, and Gouraud’s.28
Although impossible to quantify precisely, it is clear that markets in commercial depilatories never approached the scale of markets in, say, manufactured textiles, milled flour, or boots and shoes. In 1849, for instance, the value of all domestic toiletry manufactures (including but not limited to depilatories) came to about $355,000, while by 1850 cotton and woolen textile production totaled more than $65 million. Certainly the role played by commercial depilatories in directing the course of industrial manufacturing should not be overstated. Yet neither should these commodities’ influence on the course of American industry be underestimated. It is worth recalling that small-scale artisanal manufactories of the sort that produced depilatories remained the dominant mode of commodity production through the 1830s and 1840s. Even in Britain, the average textile factory employed fewer than one hundred people.29 The increasing popularity of packaged hair removers in the 1810s and 1820s, like the gradual, uneven transfer of cloth production from the household treadle looms to the water-powered factories dotting the rivers of New England, signaled an emerging reliance on manufactured goods—one made possible through the application of new chemical and mechanical arts.
One of the leading products of the age, Atkinson’s depilatory, exemplifies these new goods.30 Developed by an entrepreneur who billed himself as the “perfumer to the [British] Royal Family,” Atkinson’s was a mixture of one part ground orpiment (a common sulfide mineral), six parts quicklime, and a little flour.31 Generally applied to the face and neck, it was designed to remove “superfluous” hair, which advertisements routinely described as the greatest “blemish” a woman might possess. “This great disfigurement of female beauty,” one advertisement in the Liberator explained, “is effectually removed by this article, which is perfectly safe, and easily applied, and certain in its effects” (figure 2.1).32 Although appearing in newspapers with both black and white readers, Atkinson’s advertisements presumed that pale, hairless complexion was desired: one advertisement noted that the product would not merely remove “superfluous Hair” but also leave “the skin soft and whiter than before the application.”33
Atkinson’s was also representative in another way: the manufacturers of packaged depilatories appear to have been mostly men, despite women’s longstanding proficiency with homemade hair removers. This fact is remarkable: more generally, the manufacture of cosmetics in early-nineteenth-century America provided uncommon opportunities for women entrepreneurs, prospects unavailable in more guild-oriented, male-dominated occupations such as hairdressing, wig making, and barbering.34 By the second half of the nineteenth century, some women entrepreneurs were moving to the forefront of American cosmetics production, including Ellen Demorest (born in 1824), Madam C. J. Walker (1867), Helena Rubenstein (1870), and Elizabeth Arden (1884).35 Little evidence suggests, however, that women were similarly involved in the production or marketing of the packaged depilatories circulating in antebellum America.36
The relative paucity of women making and selling packaged depilatories points to the products’ unusual position at the confluence of folk medicine and newly centralized meat production—a domain of industry heavily dominated by men. Throughout the eighteenth century, when city dwellers accounted for only a small fraction of the nation’s population, most Americans reared and slaughtered their own animals. In the first federal census of 1790, there were only twenty-four cities in the country, and only two of those cities had populations exceeding 25,000. By 1840, however, the percentage of Americans living in cities had more than doubled, the number of cities had jumped to 131, and the population of New York City alone exceeded 250,000.37 As settlements expanded and became too crowded for individuals or families to rear their own livestock, centralized stockyards and slaughterhouses grew accordingly, further segregating humans from other domesticated animals.
Figure 2.1. An 1840 advertisement for Atkinson’s depilatory in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.
The expansion of centralized meat production spawned new investment in hair removal. Killing itself was not the tricky part of mass meat production; prior to the advent of mechanized refrigeration, the more complicated issue was distributing the meat as quickly as possible once the animal was dead. Focus thus turned to the problem of securing efficient, uninterrupted dismemberment. A giant moving chain, from which dead pigs were hung, conveyed the highly perishable animal through a “disassembly” line—credited by Henry Ford as an inspiration for his continuous factory production line. As with automobile assembly, the complex work of dismantling a large animal was divided into minute tasks, each performed by a single worker: repetitively chopping, breaking, stripping, packing. To the goal of efficient, uninterrupted disassembly, the task of stripping hair from hides presented a vexing bottleneck.38
Prior to the mechanization of slaughter, individual animal hides were stripped of hair through a gory and laborious manual process. Skins, covered with soil and blood, generally would be scrubbed clean of residual animal flesh. Hair was then softened and loosened by soaking the skin in urine, lime, or salt, and then scraped clean—“scudded”—by hand. To complete the transition from rawhide to imperishable leather, the skin would be pounded and kneaded, often with dung used as an emollient, and then stretched and dried.39 Foul-smelling from the combination of urine, feces, and decomposing flesh, these tanning operations were generally confined to the outskirts of town near moving water where waste could be dumped. With the increase in animal processing made possible by systematic disassembly, industrialists experimented with faster, less labor-intensive techniques of “unhairing” (figure 2.2). Scores of inventors sought new methods for expediting the process of transforming a living animal to its exchangeable and constitutive parts. As with the introduction of overhead conveyer chains in the disassembly process, experimenters sought to substitute nonhuman labor for human manual work.40
Where hair was concerned, many of the most effective labor-saving arts turned out to be chemical, as the influential industrial
