the fore by Indian removal, remained a central tool of racial classification. With the ascendance of a distinctly “American school” of ethnology in the 1830s and 1840s, comparative assessments of hair proliferated. Dedicated to the proposition that different races derived from multiple, distinct origins, American-school ethnologists stressed the methodological rigor that they brought to their taxonomies. Recognizing the threat that their work posed to Genesis, ethnologists like Josiah Clark Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Samuel George Morton sought to counter arguments for a single creation with the “patient examination of facts.” Detailed measurement of hair shape, texture, and amount featured prominently in these efforts. Microscopic evaluations of hair were said to reveal fundamental distinctions between races and fundamental similarities between so-called lower races and other animals. These claims then were used to support the continuing enslavement of men, women, and children of African descent.54
One of the most influential of these ethnologists, the Philadelphia microscopist and lawyer Peter A. Browne, applied his various physiological classifications of “pile” to a variety of disputes in the mid-nineteenth century: legal questions of individual racial character, medical classifications of lunacy, and ethnological debates over the “origin of the aborigines of America.”55 In one well-circulated 1853 treatise, Browne endorsed the continuation of slavery on the basis of his discernment of “three distinct species of human beings” characterized by hair type. Citing Jefferson’s earlier comparisons of “whites” and “Indians” to buttress his claims, Browne selected samples of each of those types—cylindrical (“a full-blood Choctaw Indian”), oval (“his Excellency General George Washington”), and eccentrically elliptical (“a pure Negro”)—and examined them with new tools designed to measure and compare hair: the trichometer, the discotome, and the hair revolver.56 In another widely reprinted lecture, Browne offered his examination of differences in “national pile” as a complement to Morton’s famous studies of skulls, Samuel Haldeman’s studies of the organs of speech, and Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens’s studies of skin color—all of them “sister sciences” dedicated to understanding the natural history of “man.”57 (Morton himself, architect of American racial taxonomies, devoted several early pages of his influential Crania Americana to racial differences in hair type, number, and color.)58
Figure 1.2. The “trichometer” developed by Peter A. Browne to assess typological differences in hair. (From Trichologia Mammalium [1853].)
This zeal for counting and analyzing hairs as a way to establish difference continued for generations, gaining strength alongside the institutionalization of the “human sciences.” Indeed, hierarchical concepts of race, sex, and species were given fresh heft by the consolidation of scientific organizations, professions, and agencies.59 One such institution, the U.S. Sanitary Commission, was organized by the federal government after the outbreak of the Civil War. The commission’s primary objective was to maintain the vitality of Union troops. Recognizing the unusual opportunities presented by the vast number of volunteer soldiers, the commission also conducted a large-scale anthropometric survey of Union recruits. Commissioner Charles J. Stillé boasted that the results of the study would “afford the most important contribution of observations ever made in furtherance of ‘anthropology,’ or the science of man.”60 In 1864, the well-known Boston mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould was tasked with systematizing the gargantuan collection of physical data, completing the statistical calculations, and publishing the eventual findings.61 In the resulting 613-page report, Gould took up the question, sparked by Peter Browne’s earlier studies, of “the relative amount of pilosity, or general hairiness of the body.”62
As ever, establishing evidence of such intimate matters proved a challenge. Where Thomas Jefferson based his findings about hair on the reports of white traders involved with Indian women, Gould asked an officer deployed with the 25th Army Corps on the Texan border to “avail himself of any opportunity . . . to observe the colored troops when unclothed.” Observations were to be recorded according to a standard scale: “[S]kin apparently smooth should be denoted by 0, and an amount of general hairiness equal to the maximum which he had ever seen or should see in a white man, should be called a 10.” The officer fulfilled the request expediently by “observing the men while bathing, which was an event of almost daily occurrence in the torrid climate near the mouth of the Rio Grande.”63 On the basis of the officer’s figures, collected from more than twenty-one hundred soldiers, Gould concluded that there was “little, if any, difference between the white and black races” with respect to body hair.64
Gould’s massive study, spawned by earlier anatomical classifications of hair, informed most American sciences of race in the second half of the nineteenth century.65 Moreover, his observations, along with the earlier studies of George Catlin, would soon provide the evidence for Charles Darwin’s controversial theories—with lasting consequences for subsequent ideas about race, sex, and hair.
[ 2 ]
“CHEMICALS OF THE TOILETTE”
From Homemade Remedies to a New Industrial Order
ALTHOUGH TRAVELERS AND naturalists’ fascination with Indian plucking and shaving would seem to indicate that whites themselves possessed no analogous habits, the prevalence of recipes for homemade hair removers in eighteenth-century domestic manuals and etiquette guides suggests that some of their contemporaries, at least, were seasoned hands at hair removal. Steeped in the same humoral theories of health that informed the work of Linnaeus, Buffon, and other prominent natural philosophers, ordinary colonial women viewed facial complexion as a reflection of underlying temperament and spirit. An “unblemished” face was a primary standard of physical beauty in the eighteenth century, an achievement distinguished, in part, by upper lips and temples free of visible fuzz. The woman afflicted by a troublingly “low forehead” might find an array of recipes for homemade pastes and powders to alleviate the problem.1
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, these time-worn domestic remedies began to be replaced by packaged commodities, which drew hair removal into emerging, opaque systems of manufacturing in novel ways. As long as economic development remained centered in the individual household or plantation and its surrounding farmland, women maintained crucial positions in the production of food, fabric, candles, medicines, and other household goods. Tools for hair removal, too, were created within the household, concocted primarily by women and girls for their own use—or, in the case of enslaved and indentured women, for the use of other women in the household. But as the uneven process of industrial development unfolded, women gradually were less and less likely to weave their own cloth, preserve their own meat, or mold their own soap. Similarly, women and girls who sought to clear their complexions of hair became less likely to make their own depilatory compounds than to purchase them premade, relying as they did so on industrial-grade chemicals of unknown, often dubious quality. That reliance gave rise to understandable ambivalence about whether potentially injurious commercial hair removers might cause more suffering than the “disfiguring” growths they were meant to remedy—a concern reflected and assuaged in the marketing of the new commodities as based on ancient “Eastern” or “Oriental” beauty recipes.
THE PALE, UNBLEMISHED face so central to eighteenth-century European standards of feminine beauty was no less valued in early-nineteenth-century America. Like scars or red blotches, visible hairs on the face or neck—those areas of the female body exposed by prevailing modes of dress—were considered “deformities” anathema to the reigning porcelain ideal.2 Physiognomy, the study of physical appearance revived and popularized most effectively by the Swiss clergyman Johann Kaspar Lavater, picked up on humoralism’s emphasis on complexion as a reflection of inner character. Lavater and his followers similarly correlated the distinctive pallor of racially and economically
