r/PoursTea

A series of photos by Alok Vaid-Menon exploring the connection between body hair removal and white supremacy in the US.

For accessibility the text of each photo is below. In parenthesis I have included the image reference listed at the very end.

Photo 1: The racist history of body hair removal in the US. (Image 1)

Photo 2: A picture of the book “Plucked: A History of Hair Removal” by Rebecca M. Herzig. It depicts a small green vial with a cork top and the title on its label. A pair of tweezers is in front of the bottle.

Photo 3: More than 99% of US American women voluntarily remove their body hair. More than 85% do so regularly. While body hair removal practices have existed across cultures across time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an unprecedented effort to make body hair removal mandatory for women in the US. As white men became increasingly fixated on controlling white women's beauty regimens, hairlessness became re-signified as a symbol of racial progress and superiority. (Image 2)

Photo 4: Despite the wide range in hairiness within races, 19th century European thinkers argued that hair was a marker of racial difference. New instruments like the trichometer were designed to quantify hair differences among races. After 1859, many scientists misused Darwin's theory of evolution to argue that race was an evolutionary continuum where “savages" (racialized people) were closer to animals and white "civilized" people were the most evolved form of human. In this view, body hair was seen as a marker of animality and degeneracy (an indication that a people had not evolved into civilized humanity. (Image 3)

Photo 5: Maintenance of white women's "proper" physical appearance became about maintaining the "health" of the white race in the face of migration and racial unrest. One of the prevailing eugenic ideas upheld by scientists was that more "advanced" civilizations had more of a visible difference between males and females. Mandating that white women remove their hair emphasized the visual contrast between white men and women. This allowed white thinkers to argue that the white race was superior to racial others who were demonized as sexually ambiguous. Over time, any hair on a white woman's body became seen as excessive. Body hair became symbolically associated with dirtiness because of its cultural association with racialized people. (Image 4)

Photo 6: In 1876 the American Dermatological Association began to be concerned with "hypertrichosis" (a condition that pathologized extensive body hair) focusing specifically on white women. Magazines promoted models of white, hairless feminine beauty and campaigns that discussed hair removal as "remedying" evil and removing racial markers. Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European migrants in particular were targeted by advertising for X-ray epilation under the idea that body hair removal would allow them to integrate into Anglo-dominant whiteness. This led to hundreds (if not thousands) of women dying from these procedures. (Images 5 and 6)

Photo 7: Hairy people became put on display in “freak shows" across the country to reinforce that white "civilized" people had advanced from this "primitive state." These racial politics continued into the Cold War when body hair was linked to evidence of "foreign" contamination. In the 20th century with the expansion of white women into the workplace, men's economic dominance over women and the distinction between sexes was challenged. Men had long defined their supremacy by their exclusive labor power. Women's economic mobility challenged this equation. (Image 7)

Photo 8: Regulating women's appearance was a strategy to maintain control over women and heighten the contrast between men and women (which was still understood as a marker of civilization). "Hairy women" became synonymous with "failed women." In other words, throughout the 19th and 20th century, compulsory body hair removal for women became a form of gendered social control to stabilize the sex binary in the face of imminent collapse. (Images 8 and 9)

Photo 9: We must end the idea that femininity = hairlessness and the societal expectation of women's hairlessness. Body hair has no gender. People should have the choice to maintain or remove their body hair and this shouldn't influence how they are treated. There is #NothingWrongHair (Image 10)

Photo 10: Image Credits
Image 1- Cat Huang (@cathuangart)
Image 2- Image of woman shaving armpit via crfashionbrook.com, and images of assortment of hair removal tools via Google Images
Image 3- 19th century American naturalist Peter Browne's collection of hair samples included one from former President George Washington.
Image 4- 1923 ad for ZIP hair remover
Image 5- Ad for Silkymit Hair Remover, the Australian Women's Weekly
Image 6- Electrolysis image via cosmeticsandskin.com
Image 7- Annie Jones Elliot poster via Wikimedia Commons
Image 8- Ad for a book titled, "How to overcome the superfluous hair problem" by Annette Lanzette, c. 1930s
Image 9- Ad for Dermatino Hair removal by the Dermatino Company in St. Louis, Missouri, 1902. Jay Paull, Getty Images.
Image 10- Queen Esther (@queen\_esie)
Image 11- Cover of British "Woman" magazine, c. 1940s (on this page)