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 in 1896, scientists found that besides killing carcinomas, it also eradicated hair. X-ray epilation clinics opened up all over the United States.
By the early 1920s, there were already reports that exposure to radiation could be dangerous. Yet clinics continued to stay open and offer the hair-removal service. Women were lured in by the idea of a “pain-free” procedure and kept there by brochures espousing everything from social acceptance to the socioeconomic advancement that would come from obtaining “smooth, white, velvety skin.” They specifically targeted immigrant women who might feel marginalized because of their foreign (and hairier) origins, which I, a hairy Jew, related to.
Maggie, a hairy Italian, also understood.
By 1940, the procedure was outlawed, so these radiation salons began operating in back alleys, like illegal abortion clinics. Many women suffered gruesome disfigurement, scarring, ulceration, cancer, and death, all because of the extreme pressure to become hairless. The women who were adversely affected were dubbed the “North American Hiroshima Maidens,” named after the women who suffered radiation poisoning after the nuclear bombs hit Japan in World War II.
To some women, hairlessness has literally been worth dying for. As depressing as that was, I kind of admired it.
Maggie brought her hands to her mouth and her eyes got big. “That’s a monstrosity!” she said. “That’s batshit crazy.”
“Mags,” I said, “I think I would have been one of those chicks. I would have stuck my face right into some radioactivity.”
Clearly, I still had some issues.
I continued to call on more academics for information.
Oh, who am I kidding? I was calling them for comfort.
For the past eight years, Bessie Rigakos, a sociology professor at Marian University, has studied why women remove their body hair. Her biggest challenge in finding answers has been that she cannot find enough women who don’t remove their body hair to use as a control group in her studies.
Before volunteering for her next study, I began with the basics.
Why do we remove our body hair?
“I research hair removal,” she said, “and I do it myself, and I still don’t know why we do it, which is amazing.”
I felt better already.
She went on to say there are so many factors involved that she just can’t pinpoint which exactly is the cause. “I wish I had the answer,” she said. “Is society controlling it or are women controlling it?”
Keep going, Bessie. I’m wondering the same thing myself.
One thing Rigakos definitely believes is that hair removal gives women positive feedback and is thus a positive force. “Just like how when kids pee in the potty, they are rewarded,” she said, “when women adhere to beauty standards, then they are rewarded in society.”
Somehow that analogy lost me, and I hung up from my call with Rigakos just as uncertain as before, but at least I felt academic validation in my uncertainty. Rigakos had a doctoral degree in hair-removal studies from Oxford, or something like that.
Next, I called Breanne Fahs, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Arizona State University. Fahs was incredibly passionate on the subject and spoke rapidly. Which was good, because I was getting married in less than three months and needed some quick answers.
“It’s amazing how people imagine hair removal is a choice and not a cultural requirement,” she said. “If they say it’s a choice, I say try not doing it and then tell me what you think.”
“What would happen?” I asked.
She said the practice of growing body hair can be so intense that it can show women how marginalizing it is to live as an “Other.” Growing hair, she means, will give you a taste of what it’s like to be queer, be fat, or have disabilities.
“You experience this tidal wave of negative appraisals of your body,” she explained.
“How do you think it came to be this way?” I asked.
“At the root of this is misogyny,” she said. “It’s a patriarchal culture that doesn’t want powerful women. We want frail women who are stripped of their power.” She explained that in Western culture, men are fundamentally threatened by women’s power and eroticize women who look like little girls. “We don’t like women in this culture,” she said. “Pubic-hair removal is especially egregious. It’s done to transform women into prepubescent girls. We defend it and say it’s not about that, that it’s about comfort. They say they don’t want their partner to go down on them and get a hair stuck between their teeth as if that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to them.”
When I got off the phone with her, I admit, I felt pretty tense. She made hair removal sound like it was the beginning of the end of this civilization. I didn’t need that kind of responsibility.
I needed to know if there were any reasons why, evolutionarily speaking, humans might be more attracted to hairlessness. I have to acknowledge that during my reading, I did find evidence that even though hair removal wasn’t popular in early America, it has been done on and off for as long as humans have existed.
Archaeologists believe that humans have removed facial hair since prehistoric times, pushing the edges of two shells or rocks together to tweeze. The ancient Turks may have been the first to remove hair with a chemical, somewhere between 4000 and 3000 BC. They used a substance called rhusma, which was made with arsenic trisulfide, quicklime, and starch.
In Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, Victoria Sherrow explains that women in ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire removed most body hair, using pumice stones, razors, tweezers, and depilatory creams. Greeks felt pubic hair was “uncivilized”—they sometimes singed it off with a burning lamp. Romans were less likely to put their genitals in such peril and instead used plucking and depilatory creams. When in Rome …
This means that though I’d like to place all the blame on advertisers, maybe they were just jumping on an inherently human trait and exploiting it legitimately.