Femininity (8 page)

“Jo, dear, what is it? Are you crying about Father?”

“No, not now.”

“What then?”

“My—my hair!”

Meg comforts, Jo rallies, but privately Meg holds to her opinion that Jo’s cropped
head “looked comically small on her tall sister’s shoulders.” Meg’s reservations illustrate
the unwritten rule of compensatory femininity and the esthetic ideal. If Jo had been
shorter, prettier and more graceful, the boyish trim might not have been such a disaster.
It might even have looked adorable on someone like Meg, whose “lady” credentials were
in order.

Bernice cuts her hair to be modern and popular with boys, Delia performs the sacrificial
act to buy her husband a present, Jo March cuts and sells her “one beauty” to help
her father and the family’s finances, but Alcott at least allows her heroine to argue
that short hair is a real advantage—it is “deliciously light” and “easy to keep in
order.”

When women with braided coils that had not been cut since childhood arrived at the
emotional decision to get rid of and be done with them, they needed to supply the
men in their lives with an explanation for what was taken as a rash, destructive gesture.
Practicality and manageability, they argued. Health and cleanliness, they protested.
Sticky pomades and greasy dressings made long hair a hospitable nest for dirt, soot
and head lice, and thorough washings were infrequent and troublesome, particularly
for the urban poor who lived in infested tenements and shared a communal tub and sink.
But even beyond the problems of hygiene there were other vexations a bob might cure.
Freedom from hairpins, freedom from holding combs, freedom from rats (the irksome
rolls of wire mesh that supported the upsweep), freedom from switches (the storebought
pieces that filled out a thin coiffure), freedom from fear of a strong gust of wind,
freedom from boring, repetitive hours spent washing and drying and brushing and combing
and dressing and braiding and pinning and winding and curling on damnable rags, and
freedom, simply, from a heavy, burdensome load.

But the men, so proprietary about women’s hair, were not easily won over. They howled
in rage. And although the issue
was cast by feminists in practical terms—Charlotte Perkins Gilman took to the lecture
circuit to champion short hair as sensible and sanitary—it was glamour in the person
of Irene Castle that probably caused a national change of mind. When America’s favorite
dancing partner cut her hair and wrapped a string of pearls around her forehead, the
daring act became the Castle Clip, and suddenly short hair was romantic, chic and
very classy.

Irene Castle claimed full credit for the short-hair craze. “I believe I am largely
blamed for the homes wrecked and engagements broken because of clipped tresses,” she
gaily wrote in the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
taking care to warn her readers that the new style was not for every head—an older,
graying woman might look “a bit kittenish and not quite dignified”—and she cautioned
that “rather small features also help.” Castle was rich and famous, a glamorous star
for whom the ordinary rules did not apply, but for women who could not dance their
way to economic independence the bob still was fraught with role rebellion.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who had rescued herself from a life of neurasthenic invalidism,
was among the first to understand.
Herland,
her feminist Utopian novel of 1915, told of an athletic, happy, all-female society
where everyone wore her hair short, “some few inches at most … all light and clean
and freshlooking.” A male visitor to Herland complains, “If only their hair were long,
they would look so much more feminine,” but in the wonderful manner of Utopian fiction
he is quickly converted.

In March of 1916 Gilman addressed the Working Women’s Protective Union in New York
City with these words: “It was not the Lord who gave men short hair while women’s
is long,” she told her audience. “It was the scissors. I am not asking you to go home
and cut your hair, though I think we would all be much cleaner and happier and more
comfortable with it short. You wouldn’t do it anyway. But I do ask you if this isn’t
a joke: If a woman—who has no more natural reason for wearing her hair long than a
man—goes and cuts it off, people say, ‘Oh, shame: she wants to be a man!’ But what
do they say when the case is
reversed? Whiskers are a man’s natural prerogative, but now when he shaves off his
whiskers and goes with a smooth face, why don’t they say to him, ‘You want to look
like a woman!’”

Charlotte Gilman had taken on convention, and the following day
The New York Times
took on Mrs. Gilman. “City Sends Up Mighty Protest Against the Fiat That Beauty Should
Be Cropped,” the
Times
headlined, continuing, “Sounds End of Romance/History, Literature, and Poetry Must
Be Made Over to Meet Mrs. Gilman’s Proposal.” The satirical piece, run as straight
news, pretended to quote the man in the street: “Women’s beauty is in her hair, and
it’s her first duty to be good-looking.” There was also a waggish response from a
barber: “If a woman needs a haircut she may need a shave.” Citing “great opposition
among milliners,” the
Times
deadpanned, “Makers of combs and hairpins, horse growers who furnish false hair,
manufacturers of mirrors as well as publishers of style books are expected to organize
a crusade against Mrs. Gilman’s idea.” From “among the literati at Columbia” came
the dire prediction that poets “will talk no more of tresses but rather of pompadours
and shaves.”

Funny stuff, but a mockery of the question. And beneath the mockery, the real concerns
of men.

A woman’s right to wear her hair short, and the social implications of her action,
garnered as much newspaper space in the 1920s as the question of long hair on men
received some forty years later, and for similar reasons. Well-meaning people were
affronted by what they considered to be a frightening challenge to the conventions
of the masculine-feminine polarity. They responded with an anger that they themselves
poorly understood, and they covered their confusion with ringing laughter and pious
sentiments over decency, dignity and moral codes.

Five years after Gilman’s lecture the issue of bobbed hair could no longer be treated
as a joke. Chicago’s largest department store, Marshall Field, publicly dismissed
a salesgirl, Miss Helen Armstrong, on the grounds that her bob was “not dignified.”
Other Marshall Field employees who dared to cut were told to report to work in hairnets
until their bobs grew out. The liberal conscience was finally pricked. That repository
of social
concern
The Nation
rose to the defense of short-haired women in a stirring editorial. Marshall Field,
the magazine charged, “was guilty of an unwarrantable infringement of personal liberty.”
The New York Times
weighed the issue on its editorial page and conceded that “Some women find that bobbed
hair is convenient and sensible.”

As late as 1927 the women’s magazines were still doing features on both sides of the
hair-length question. Opera diva Mary Garden was called upon to tell the world why
she made the decision to cut—“I consider getting rid of our long hair one of the many
little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom,” she wrote
with conviction—and America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, defended her waist-length
curls by pleading that if she took up the shears, her mother, her husband, her maid
and, above all, her fans would never forgive her. “Can you imagine a fairy princess
with short, bobbed locks?” asked the silver screen’s own princess. “It is unthinkable
and almost shocking.”

She was right. Who can imagine a fairy princess with hair that is anything but long
and blonde, with eyes that are anything but blue, in clothes that are anything but
a filmy drape of gossamer and gauze? The fairy princess remains one of the most powerful
symbols of femininity the Western world has ever devised, and falling short of her
role model, women are all feminine failures to some degree.

A shrewd businesswoman who was one of the founders of United Artists, Pickford hesitated
to tamper with her personal trademark. She was the Girl with the Curl, and her fans
wrote letters pleading with her not to cut her hair. “I haven’t the courage to fly
in the face of their disapproval, nor have I the wish,” she admitted. “For their love
and affection and loyalty I owe them everything, and if curls are the price I shall
pay it.” According to her biography the price was steep. When she was shooting a movie,
it took Mary Pickford three hours each morning to wash, set and dry her naturally
straight hair on rags and rollers. In humid weather she needed another hour in midday,
while shooting came to a halt, to revive the drooping curls. But big, fat, sausage-shaped
ringlets were a fantasy about what little girls
should look like, and Mary Pickford was thirty-six years old at the time she made
her public promise not to cut her golden curls. One year later, however, she did just
that. A photograph of Pick-ford under the scissors was published in newspapers around
the world with captions that mourned the end of an age of innocence. “You would have
thought I murdered someone,” she later said, “and perhaps I had.”

Pickford wanted to play grownup parts in a grownup hairdo. “It was a very sad business
indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part,
on a head of hair,” she wrote. But the public wanted the Girl with the Curl, and a
few years after her publicized haircut, Mary Pickford retired from the screen.

Of all the wonders Hollywood has created, nothing can match the pantheon of celebrated
blondes who have fed the fantasies of men and fueled the aspirations of women ever
since the flickering image began to move across the giant screen. Did Hollywood create
the American cult of blondeness, or did it merely magnify the collective dreams of
a melting pot that despite democratic intentions placed the highest value in feminine
beauty on Nordic fairness and flaxen hair? Surely the dark-haired immigrant entrepreneurs
from Eastern Europe and their first-generation sons who abandoned the steamy garment
center of New York to pioneer a motion picture empire in the sunshine of the West
were fully aware that the visions of blonde loveliness they projected onto the screen
bore no resemblance to their mothers and sisters, or to the women they might have
been expected to marry. Those who hand-cranked the dream machine spun their own fantasies
of California gold, angel-haired virgins and peroxide sirens who had never seen the
inside of a ghetto.

In
Popcorn Venus,
her history of women in film, Marjorie Rosen suggests that from the beginning of
the talking motion picture, hair style and hair color eclipsed voice and talent in
the making of a movie goddess. When it came to the machinery of sex appeal and hype,
magnificent hair had an advantage over magnificent breasts and legs on the person
of a manufactured star. With the help of artful studio hairdressers who could alter
a hairline as easily as they could change a color, and with studio
publicists who could stretch a fact to make a story, a mass of healthy hair could
be turned into a phenomenon of such magical unreality that mortal women flocked to
the beauty parlor to achieve the effect for themselves. The blonde was enshrined for
her blondeness, and it didn’t matter if the inspiration began in a bottle. Brassy,
wisecracking Jean Harlow skyrocketed to fame as the Platinum Bombshell in the 1930s
and started a national craze for peroxide bleach. A decade later the sultry dip worn
over one eye by diminutive, blonde Veronica Lake catapulted her to stardom as a siren
of the screen. The Veronica Lake dip was copied in hair salons across the country
and the Veronica Lake hairbrush was hawked by Fuller salesmen from door to door.

From 1941 to 1943
Life
magazine ran five pictorial features on Veronica Lake, and in retrospect they tell
the brief story of her sudden rise and fall, a casualty of an unexpected collision
between Hollywood hype and wartime propaganda. Two weeks before Pearl Harbor
Life
celebrated Veronica’s hair as a national treasure, divulging the approximate number
of hairs on her head (150,000), and reporting that the length was seventeen inches
in front and twenty-four inches in back, falling eight inches below her shoulders.
The silken cascade,
Life’s
readers learned, was shampooed twice, treated with oil and rinsed in vinegar each
morning. Because the long blonde strands were so fine (.0024 inches in cross section)
they tended to snag on buttons and bracelets, and more than once Veronica had singed
her golden treasure while smoking a cigarette.

In 1943, alas, the peekaboo blonde was a war menace. Defense-plant workers with the
Veronica Lake dip were getting their hair caught in the machines, and the War Production
Board, promoting its own image of Rosie the Riveter, asked the star to give up her
famous trademark “for the duration.” On the advice of Paramount she posed again for
Life
with her golden tresses braided and pinned to her scalp and announced, “Any woman
who wears her hair over one eye is silly.” Veronica Lake had done her part for the
War effort, but without her sultry, languid dip her movie career sputtered into oblivion.
Other blondes soon rose to take her place, and each has had her season
in the sun, and sometimes her own signature hairdo, like Veronica’s or Farrah Fawcett’s,
that briefly becomes the national look of the glamorous American girl.

It is hard not to be influenced by the popular judgment that blondes are to the manner
born, that whatever their individual features, they are prettier and luckier than
dark-haired women, blessed by the Gods with a halo of good fortune. To be sure, I
make my obeisance only before natural blondes, but this is a stubborn quirk that does
not seem to be shared by the legions of men who are unabashed adorers of blondes,
who will date only blondes, or who throw up their hands charmingly and confess that
they have “a thing” for blondes whether or not they are dark at the roots.