Abstract
The author seeks to illuminate points of contact between social scientific theory and the history of facial hair in the West. It offers four general conclusions. First, the cultural meanings of beards and shaving have proved deep-seated and durable, even if not fixed or universal. Second, facial hair and shaving have been used to establish and communicate contrasting social and ideological identities both in a given era and across time. Third, the history of facial hair both supports and amends the theory of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Finally, beard history illustrates how men of the West in every era have relied on the idealised male body to assert and justify an authoritative model of manliness.
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- 1.
General works on masculinity and the body do not yet reflect recent studies of the history of hair. Susan Bordo’s, The Male Body (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000) does not discuss hair at all. There is very limited consideration in other important works, including George L. Mosse’s, The Image of Man : The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Derek G. Neal’s, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008); Christopher E. Forth’s, Masculinity in the Modern West : Gender , Civilization and the Body (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, et al.’s, A History of Virility, trans. Keith Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). An impressive body of new work is building our understanding of hair in history, including Alun Withey , “Shaving and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Britain ,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 (2013): 225–43; Daisy Hay, “Hair in the Disraeli Papers: A Victorian Harvest,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19, no. 3 (2014): 332–45; Michael Kwass , “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France ,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 631–59; E. Snook, “Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege in Early Modern England ,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2015): 22–51. In 2004 a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies was dedicated to hair: Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004). Recent work has also looked at baldness: Anu Korhonen, “Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–91.
- 2.
Christopher Oldstone-Moore , Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
- 3.
R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). John Tosh has discussed the value and weaknesses of the theory in “Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender ,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 41–58. Many historians who have found Connell’s theory to be inadequate have proposed modifications of the idea, rather than its abandonment. A recent example is Henry French and Mark Rothery , Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–18.
- 4.
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man : The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West : Gender , Civilization and the Body (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
- 5.
Sigmund Freud , “Leonardo da Vinci,” in Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 96; see also “Fetishism,” Works, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 157.
- 6.
Sigmund Freud , “Medusa ’s Hair,” in Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 273–74.
- 7.
Freud makes this comment with regard to the beard on Michelangelo ’s statue of Moses . See Sigmund Freud , Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 13 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 218.
- 8.
William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 535.
- 9.
Charles Berg , The Unconscious Significance of Hair (Washington, DC: Guild Press, 1951), 76.
- 10.
Berg, The Unconscious Significance of Hair , 15.
- 11.
Berg, The Unconscious Significance of Hair , 76.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Edmund Leach , “Magical Hair,” in Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism, ed. John Middleton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988 [1958]), 90.
- 14.
Leach, “Magical Hair,” 97.
- 15.
Robert Mills , “The Signification of the Tonsure,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages , eds. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 112–16.
- 16.
Mark Albert Johnston , Beard Fetish in Early Modern England : Sex Gender , and Registers of Value (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33–56.
- 17.
Mills, “The Signification of the Tonsure,” 122–23.
- 18.
C. R. Hallpike, “Social Hair ,” Man 2 (1969): 259–60.
- 19.
Hallpike, “Social Hair ,” 259.
- 20.
Hallpike, “Social Hair ,” 261.
- 21.
Raymond Firth , Symbols: Public and Private (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 266.
- 22.
Firth, Symbols, 285–86.
- 23.
Firth, Symbols, 298.
- 24.
Anthony Synnott , “Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair,” British Journal of Sociology 38 (1987): 381–413.
- 25.
Nigel Barber , “Mustache Fashion Covaries with a Good Marriage Market for Women ,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 25 (2001): 261–72.
- 26.
Christopher Hallpike , “Hair,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 5, ed. Mircea Eliade (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
- 27.
Christian Bromberger , “Hair: From the West to the Middle East Through the Mediterranean,” Journal of American Folklore 121 (2008): 380.
- 28.
Bromberger, “Hair,” 395.
- 29.
Bromberger, “Hair,” 392.
- 30.
See Judith Butler , Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also Joan Wallach Scott , Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
- 31.
Connell, Masculinities, 56.
- 32.
Connell, Masculinities, 67–86, 185–203.
- 33.
Tosh, “Hegemonic Masculinity ,” 55–56.
- 34.
Thomas Laqueur , Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990).
- 35.
Laqueur, Making Sex, 6.
- 36.
Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). See also Karen Harvey, “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England,” Gender and History 14 (2002): 202–23.
- 37.
John Tosh , “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain , 1800–1914,” Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005): 336–37.
- 38.
Mosse, The Image of Man , 4.
- 39.
Mosse, The Image of Man , 5.
- 40.
Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West, 5.
- 41.
This outline of the history of beards is derived from my book Of Beards and Men.
- 42.
The Amish beard style was a deliberate choice. They shaved their moustaches and grew the rest of the beard: the exact opposite of late seventeenth-century moustachioed gentlemen. See Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 34.
- 43.
Tosh, “Hegemonic Masculinity ,” 52–56.
- 44.
French and Rothery, Man’s Estate, 11–14.
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Oldstone-Moore, C. (2018). Social Science, Gender Theory and the History of Hair. In: Evans, J., Withey, A. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73497-2_2
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