Women, hair and anarchists
With hairdressers in the UK currently closed for lockdown again, we republish Anna Cermakova's 2017 post on the important role of hair.
How often do you think about your hair? Every
morning looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking is this going to be a
‘good/bad hair’ day? How often do you change the colour of your hair? How often
do you substantially change the length or style of your hair? When is the time
right for such a change? I have personally been quite unadventurous with my
hair for most of my life and never really worried until it started to grow
grey… I have always had long or longish hair and never even considered having a
really short ‘boy’ haircut; not that I don’t like short hair but it never even
occurred to me to try and have a short haircut — so established is the custom
for many women to have their hair long. One of John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland (1865), which is part of the
‘visual’ of the GLARE
project I am working on, triggered a comment from a colleague: “love the
Alice picture (very different from Disney princess — but still big eyes and
long hair!”) — so I set off for a little
fascinating journey to explore hair, its length
and other issues. And as I have learned on this
journey, “[e]ven if you think your hair is meaningless, it still sends a
message to every observer” (Lowe 2016: 12).
It has not always been so, but in Western
culture, from a certain point in time, it has become customary for men to wear
short hair and for women to wear long, but controlled, hair. This is often
traced back to St. Paul’s writing to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11: 14-15), where
he says that a woman’s long hair is her pride. Throughout history, hair styles
have varied a lot, often carrying cultural and/or religious significance. As
Scott Lowe in his wonderful little book on Hair
says: “It seems likely that while hair styling always has meaning, that meaning
is not fixed or universal — it changes with time, place, and social group — and
in secular settings it can mutate practically overnight” (Lowe 2016: 11). For
women though, it has nearly always and everywhere been the case to have their
hair long. Today, for many, long hair still seems to be the utmost expression
of femininity. Recently, my attention caught an article in The
Times (24.10.2017) about Hannah Gadsby, an award winning stand-up
comedian, who is diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s syndrome and due to her
illness cannot grow her hair long — “because it annoys me, not because I don’t
want to be feminine”, she comments with a regret. Susan Brownmiller in her book
on Femininity says: “I harbour a deep desire to
wear my hair long because like all the women I know, I grew up believing that
long hair is irrefutably feminine” (my
emphasis) (Brownmiller 1986: 34). Many of us, however, may see this
‘irrefutable femininity’ loaded with other symbolism as well, an entry on ‘long
hair’ in the online feminist theory dictionary for example describes ‘long hair’ as “a
pervasive Western (patriarchal) norm”.
“From time immemorial, hair has been used to
make a visual statement, for the body’s most versatile raw material can be cut,
plucked, shaved, curled, straightened, braided, greased, bleached, tinted, dyed
and decorated with precious ornaments” (Brownmiller 1986: 36); however,
considerations of hair do not belong only to the domain of fashion.
Historically, hair rituals have often had sexual associations (Leach 1958) and
cutting or shaving one’s hair has been associated with mourning or magic
performing rituals (Hallpike 1969: 257-258). And it makes sense, except for a
few notable exceptions (Scott Lowe mentions Bruce Willis) for most of us,
“[h]ead shaving can make one genderless” as it “removes one of our most potent
sources of vanity and attractiveness” (Lowe 2016: 53, 54).
But the ‘hair debate’ is also political —
cutting one’s hair is generally associated with social control (Hallpike 1969,
Lowe 2016). “Long hair can be trouble, at least for the guardians of social and
religious orthodoxy. Libertines and rebels, outlaws and antinomians all favor
long, loose hair. It’s bad for the status quo, and it’s often bad for business”
(Lowe 2016: 70). Hallpike delimits the social groups in Western society that
wear long hair, these are: “intellectuals, juvenile rebels against society and
women” — this trio reminds me of the famous George Lakoff’s title of the book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). According
to Hallpike, long hair is “a symbol of being in some way outside society, of
having less to do with it, or of being less amenable to social control than the
average citizen” (Hallpike 1969: 261). This citation is taken out of context
and does not extend to women in Hallpike’s text, but it still means the
‘average citizen’ equals ‘male citizen’. So there is the ‘average citizen’ and
all the other citizens deviating from the ‘average’.
Synnott (1987) in his study of hair views our
world in binary oppositions: opposite sexes have opposite hair; head hair and
body hair are opposite; opposite ideologies have opposite hair. Hair is “not
only a sex symbol” but also “an ideological symbol”. It can express
“[o]pposition to conventional sex roles, to conventional definitions of
femininity and to the conventional norms for women” (Synott 1987: 394). Looking
at our history and religions, hair is often the vehicle that constructs the difference.
It has “the power to indicate allies and foes, potential sex partners and
possible rivals, our group versus the others” (Lowe 2016: 36), and as Lowe says
“[s]ocieties actively employ hair to manufacture the ‘Other’” (ibid.).
Hair embodies a very powerful symbolism (both
for men and women), Synott mentions a bizarre legal case (reported in Montreal Gazette on 25.9.1984) of a secretary in New
York, whose long hair was shaved off by a jealous wife and as a compensation
for this loss, she was awarded $117,500. This was in the 1980’s but if we go
back to the 1920’s, women not only stopped wearing a corset, started wearing
short skirts and trousers but also, proudly, “demonstrated their newfound
emancipation by bobbing their hair” (Brownmiller 1986: 40). All of these female
emancipation demonstrations were met with much hostility from many men (e.g.
women were not allowed to wear trousers in the U.S. Senate until 1993!).
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| Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash |
The other marked colour of hair is, of course,
grey. But that has to do with another topic… it is some consolation to know
that grey hair does not worry only me, it was a source of worry already in
ancient Rome. Romans went to great lengths to cover their grey hair with
various dyes. Talking about hair colour and the Romans, there is another
interesting fact related to the blond hair colour. In Rome, prostitutes were
required by law to bleach their hair or to wear blond wigs. So it seems likely
that the link between blond hair and sexually promiscuous behaviour to ‘blonds
having more fun’ dates back to ancient Rome (Lowe 2016: 106).
Mythology, the Bible
and literature is full of stories of hair having magical or supernatural powers.
Hair as a metaphor representing various forms of the patriarchal exploitation
of female bodies is also present in the recent novel Norma
by the Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen. The main female character, Norma,
has supernatural hair, sensitive to the slightest changes in her mood and the
moods of those around her. Against the background of a dark family drama,
Oksanen reveals the world of the exploitation of women’s bodies and the
extremes to which people will go for the sake of beauty. The theme of female
vanity and long hair going hand in hand is also present in a much older text, a
short story for children Melisande by Edith
Nesbit (from Nine Unlikely Tales, 1901). Here —
as expected in a fairy tale, though carrying a title ‘unlikely’ — the princess
with too long hair has to be rescued by a clever prince.
In fact, in contemporary
children’s fiction (based on the data in the Oxford
Children’s Corpus (OCC)), the adjective long with hair
is less frequent than some of the colour adjectives (black, dark, red),
but it is twice as frequent than curly and seven times more frequent
than short hair. Hair as part of the character description is a
bit more frequent with female characters but evaluative adjectives like lovely
and beautiful occur with both girls’ and boys’ hair. Overall, even
though hair is not mentioned particularly frequently, one of the main,
socially regulating, take away messages, in terms of hair length, is that boys
may have had long hair in the past but it is no longer the case and the girls
are expected to have long hair. The following is a random selection of
quotations (emphasis is mine) from children’s books in the British National
Corpus (BNC) and OCC:
If I didn't have long
hair, everyone would think I was a boy.
He had very long hair
at the time and a beard, Lewis remembered, and looked as they all did
like some kind of weird prophet.
We should think long
hair silly for boys now, but it was the fashion then.
Sometimes it was his hair
that displeased them. Boys were not supposed to have long hair. Worse
than this, if you were Orphanage scum, boy or girl, you were supposed to have
your head shaved.
With a vicious stroke, the
trader knocked her to the ground, then caught and held her by her long hair.
She sat down in front of
her looking-glass, and brushed at her lovely heavy blonde hair. “I was
so fed up this evening, so miserable, before you came, that I was going to cut
off all my long hair just to annoy that cross woman.”
Maybe Kat and I had done
the reverse: assumed the person in the pink fluffy jacket was a woman, just
because she had long hair.
Her long hair was in braids and her blue eyes were tearful.
Hair also plays an important role in the
recently published, wonderful book, which won the Waterstone’s children’s book
prize in 2017: The Girl of Ink and Stars by
Kiran Millwood Hargrave. The main character of the book, Isabella, needs to set
off for a dangerous rescue journey — she needs to save her island, her father
and her best friend. To qualify to join the rescue party, she needs to look
like a boy. She cuts her hair. Unexpectedly, she meets her lost friend Pablo:
I waited until the door
closed, then turned quickly to Pablo. ‘Is Da all right?’
‘Why have you cut your
hair?’
‘To come here.’
He sniffed. ‘Looks all
right.’
‘I don’t care how it
looks. How’s Da?’
His face was inscrutable.
‘Why are you here?’
‘How is he?’
Long hair, whether we like it
or not, seems to be ‘now and here’ still the norm for women and girls and short
hair for men and boys (norm not as externally defined but given by the
majority). Deviation from the norm, and women with short hair are even today
perceived as deviating, may occasionally be met with direct hostility. When we, women, cut our hair, does that change our lives? Coco
Chanel, who freed women from corsets, showed their ankles and taught them to
wear trousers, famously said “A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her
life”. Is ‘cutting our hair’ a statement that
we want to play the boys’ game and there is no other way in as in Isabella’s
case, or is that a sign of emancipation – saying we want to play our own game?
What are we telling the world when we wear short/long hair? Because hair always
tells a story…
Anna Cermakova is a Marie Curie Sklodowska Postdoctoral Fellow at the
University of Birmingham. Together with Prof. Michaela Mahlberg she works on
GLARE project, Exploring Gender in Children’s Literature from a Cognitive
Corpus Stylistic Perspective, the project runs from September 2017 to August
2019.
References
Brownmiller, S. (1986) Feminitity. London: Paladin Books.
Hallpike, C. (1969) Social Hair. Man, 4(2), 256-264
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leach, E. (1958). Magical Hair. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 88(2), 147-164.
Lowe, S. (2016). Hair. London: Bloomsbury
Synnott, A. (1987). Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair. The British Journal of Sociology, 38(3), 381-413.
References
Brownmiller, S. (1986) Feminitity. London: Paladin Books.
Hallpike, C. (1969) Social Hair. Man, 4(2), 256-264
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leach, E. (1958). Magical Hair. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 88(2), 147-164.
Lowe, S. (2016). Hair. London: Bloomsbury
Synnott, A. (1987). Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair. The British Journal of Sociology, 38(3), 381-413.
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