Posts Tagged by kayla chenault
In 1992, Jill Shurtleff, a designer with the Gillette Razor company, challenged the idea that women’s razors should be limited to the repackaging of men's razors with a different color scheme. Considering how women shave, where they shave and why they shave, Shurtleff created the Sensor for Women razor with a wider handle for better grip and a blade cartridge designed to get into hard-to-see crooks of the body. She might not have known it at the time, but her work intersects with a complex history of body hair removal. Women's relationship with their body hair has evolved tremendously over the past two centuries. Why and how women choose to remove it — or not remove it — reflects changes in technology, politics, fashion, and culture that still impact people today.
The Sensor for Women Razor from Gillette was the first razor designed for women’s shaving needs specifically in mind. / THF803274
Before the mid-1800s, removing so-called "superfluous hair" — the term used for body and facial hair — was rare but could be dangerous. For women who suffered from hirsutism, extra hair growth on the face, books provided homemade depilatory recipes. These remedies often contained caustic and poisonous ingredients such as barium hydroxide, quicklime, and arsenic, but the danger of these chemicals was unknown at the time. Following the American Civil War, electricity transitioned from being a scientific fascination to an everyday utility, and many turned to its power for their hair removal needs. Electrolysis, using electrified needles to zap hair follicles and make the hair fall out, rose in popularity in the 1870s. The process was expensive, grueling, and painful; inattentive dermatologists could permanently scar their patients’ faces. Later hair removal methods were riskier. One infamous depilatory cream known as Koremlu contained thallium acetate, a main ingredient in rat poison; women reported neuropathic pain, blindness, and even paralysis after using Koremlu. In the 1920s, hair salons installed x-ray machines to rid women of facial hair; women exposed to the radiation from these machines experienced ulcerated sores and cancerous tumors on their faces. However, x-ray machines for hair removal processes remained popular until the end of the 1940s.
"Sheer" hair remover, circa 1928-1935. This depilatory cream used the now banned substance, Mercurochrome, a compound of mercury and bromine. / THF802140
Women risked their lives for smooth skin, because the stakes of hairiness were not merely aesthetic. Some women with extreme hair growth on their faces and bodies were put on display for circus entertainment or studied as evolutionary anomalies, practices that caused great harm. Early electrolysis practitioners reported their patients were nearly suicidal due to their hairiness. Prominent psychologist and eugenicist, Knight Dunlap, wrote in a 1921 book that inherent hairlessness was evidence of a woman's fitness for partnership and motherhood. Being hairless was not just about beauty standards; it was seen as proof of one's humanity.
This 1898 Barnum and Bailey’s circus poster shows a woman with hirsutism who was placed on display. / 35.784.116 Image by Kayla Chenault.
Even with these pressures to be hairless, true ubiquity of hair removal came with a change in clothing styles. During the first three decades of the 20th century, women's fashion was revolutionized, and more of the body was on display than ever before. Haute couture designers, such as Paul Poiret or the Callot sisters, created free-flowing, loose-fitting garments inspired by clothing from Ancient Greece, Japan, and the Middle East. These styles came in vogue with fashion-conscious upper-class women in the early 1910s and trickled down into the mainstream during and after the First World War.
Wedding Dress (1918). This Lucile Ltd. wedding dress exemplifies the flowing, popular couture style. / THF29590
These new styles featured short or sheer sleeves, or sometimes no sleeves at all, leaving women's underarms exposed. In 1915, the first advertisements touting the merits of removing underarm hair appeared in women's magazines. The ads featured illustrations of women in the latest gowns, showing off their smoothness, which could be achieved with depilatories or razors. Gillette promoted its Milady Décolleté as the first razor advertised for women. The Milady Décolleté razor was not designed for women specifically; it was the Gillette men's razor with a smaller blade head and specialized packaging. But the advertising worked, and women became a profitable market for safety razors.
Trade Catalogue, "By Request, Gillette Milady Décolleté" (1915). / THF720459 and THF720460
In the 1920s and 1930s, leg hair removal slowly entered the mainstream as popular hemlines exposed more of the leg. Smooth legs were in vogue with young women but caused a minor societal panic over the changing aesthetic. Newspapers ran sensationalist stories about women racing to the doctor after cutting their legs trying to shave them . Some men wrote opinion pieces about disliking the look of smooth legs. The myth that getting rid of one's leg hair made it grow back darker and thicker was a common cautionary tale perpetuated in women’s beauty guides.
Trade Catalogue, "Present Modes demand this harmless preparation," circa 1925. This depilatory cream instruction brochure shows women who have used the cream on their legs. / THF720482
Women fully embraced smooth legs during the Second World War. Wartime rationing programs limited the production of nylon hosiery, leaving women bare-legged. Meanwhile, beautification and personal grooming were considered a patriotic duty for women to boost morale. There was also a lingering belief from earlier eugenic thought that body hairs were "unhygienic" though it had no real scientific basis. Without stockings to cover up these hairs, more women began shaving their legs as a matter of habit.
Photographic print, "Mercury Town Sedan near Suwanee Lagoon in Greenfield Village, July 1941" (1941). / THF134812
In just a few generations, shaving body hair had transitioned from an advertisement ploy and a newspaper novelty to a rite of passage and a necessity for modern women. By the 1960s and 1970s, it was not a question of if someone should shave their legs and underarms but when they should start. Chances are, if you are a woman in the United States, you have tried to get rid some of your body hair. A 2005 study found that 99 percent of women in the U.S. have shaved their body at some point in their lives.
Sears Kenmore Model 820-93942 Electric Shaver, (1960-1970). Electric shavers were advertised to women for the legs and underarms following the Second World War. / THF172751
However, not everyone removes body hair, and there are myriad reasons why. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s, women's rights activists, particularly those who considered themselves women's liberationists, raised concerns about why women removed body hair at all. Some women decided to grow out their hair as a political statement against objectification, as a testament to their gender and sexual identities, and as a part of a "back to nature" ethos. The non-shavers were relatively few, but there was a visceral reaction to the idea of women not shaving. For opponents of the women's movement, "hairy feminist" was an easy punchline and an affront to femininity itself. Visible body hair became shorthand for the politics of the person who chooses it.
Poster, “The Women’s Liberation Movement” (1970). / THF92260
The dynamic and sometimes dangerous evolution of the very personal relationship women have with their body hair continues to inform people’s daily lives — whether they choose to be bare or hairy.
Kayla Chenault is an Associate Curator at The Henry Ford.
