Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (22 page)

American writers produced the most eccentric theories, namely that hair helped the body maintain its electrical balance. New discoveries about the properties of electricity and the human nervous system sparked speculation about the electrical properties of hair. One notion, proposed by a contributor to the
American Phrenological Journal
, was that the high conductivity of hair allowed it to collect valuable electrical force for use by the brain and nervous system.
27
This explained why hairiness was commonly associated with “mental power and brilliancy.” Another writer, noting, that hair is in fact an insulator, not a conductor of electricity, claimed that it helped keep the body’s stores of electrical force from draining away into the air. Men who shaved lost electricity and thus vital energy.

Beard activists were always enthusiastic about the healthiness of hair, but they were even more excited about its moral force, in particular its power to express masculine character and authority. The beard, wrote French physician Auguste Debay, was a “natural ornament of the male visage” that “protects and enhances the luster of the skin with its silky shadows, and adds powerfully to the majesty of the human face.”
28
An American journalist asserted in 1857 that even men who have not yet developed full and well-shaped beards “are ennobled by the look of strength and vigour which they newly wear.”
29
A key feature of manly dignity in the democratic age was self-reliance and independence. In his 1853 book on hair, Englishman Alexander Rowland declared grandly that a bearded man was “a man of strongly-marked individuality . . . [who] will not fawn or cringe to any man.”
30
This self-assertion
of facial hair was the reason the legal and clerical professions often pushed back against the new trend. The battles of French lawyers for facial freedom inspired one among their number, Léon Henry, to produce a full-volume manifesto in 1879 entitled
La Barbe et la Liberté
(The Beard and Liberty), in which he defended every man’s inalienable right to express his personality in hair.
31
All in all, there was widespread agreement among enthusiasts that men who grew their beards were tough, decisive, and independent, because, like Smith and Whitman, they were releasing and activating their natural strengths. As Thomas Gowing wrote in
The Philosophy of Beards
, the enterprising brow, sagatious eyes, firm lip, and bearded chin “proclaim a being who has an appointed path to tread, and hard rough work to do, in this world of difficulties and ceaseless transition.”
32
A contributor to a usually sober-minded English journal,
The Westminster Review
, agreed: “The beard—identified as it is with sternness, dignity and strength—is only the becoming complement of true manliness.”
33

Like the fearless, mountain-climbing Albert Smith or the indomitable Walt Whitman, men could declare that their bodies were the solid foundation of both personal and political autonomy. By the same token, they could affirm their masculine prerogative over women. It was no mere coincidence that the era of beards corresponded closely with the emergence of the women’s movement. The American women’s rights movement was launched at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, followed two years later by the formation of the National Women’s Rights Convention under the leadership of Lucy Stone. Also in 1848, German feminist Louise Otto-Peters founded
Frauen-Zeitung
(Women’s News), and in 1849, the Englishwoman Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female physician practicing in her country. These were just early signs of greater things to come. Significant as these events were, the most profound change in the gender order involved not politics or the professions but the home. The so-called “cult of domesticity” relegated women to homemaking and child-rearing, while reserving public and commercial life for men. While this code limited women’s sphere of action, it also imposed limits on men. As wives claimed sovereignty over home and children, the patriarch’s domestic dominion was constrained.
34

In these circumstances, it is no wonder that much of the discussion
about beards centered on affirming a supposedly natural gender order that placed men in command. Facial hair provided a helpful argument in this cause. One American journal stated it succinctly: “The natural and appropriate spheres of man and woman, respectively, are plainly indicated by the hirsute, bristling image of the one and the less-protected face of the other.”
35
The typical explanation of why women were less protected was, as Englishmen Henry Morley and William Henry Wills put it, that “man is born to work out of doors and in all weathers, for his bread; woman was created for duties of another kind, which do not involve constant exposure to sun, wind, and rain.”
36
The English author of
An Apology for the Beard
(1862) offered beards, as guardians of the throat and voice, as proof of the masculine authority to speak, preach, and teach: “It is the man’s duty to teach with his voice. It is the woman’s to ‘learn in silence.’”
37

In their insistence that facial hair promoted health, demonstrated manly virtue, and validated the gender order, champions of the beard exposed deep-seated worries about the condition of men and manliness in the industrial age. As more and more people migrated to cities and towns in the early nineteenth century, men’s work moved from fields and workshops to offices and factories. Work was less physical but often more competitive and stressful, and it usually took place away from home, wife, and children. In middle-class households especially, women assumed leadership of the home and of the children, and they were gradually gaining rights to their property, to divorce, and to custody of children. Women were also making their way slowly into the public sphere, as well as higher levels of educational and professional achievement. Women had by no means achieved equality with men, but traditional patriarchy was not on entirely sound footing either. Men had to work out anew what it meant to be a father and husband.

Feeling greater pressure to compete with each other and with women, men anxiously sought to establish more compelling notions of manhood. Increasingly, they chose to emphasize their “natural” physical, moral, and intellectual strengths. When men’s work was less physical than ever, sports and beards helped them affirm the nobility of the male body. When business and politics were more open and competitive, a beard helped secure a sense of personal honor. When wives challenged male mastery over the home, a beard confirmed a husband’s
status as domestic patriarch. While men claimed that facial hair was a comfort to the throat and nerves, the real comfort was to their self-esteem. The nobility of facial hair was unique to men—with a few surprising exceptions.

Between 1849 and 1854 Josephine Clofullia was an international sensation. A Swiss woman married to a Frenchman, she was a popular attraction in French shows, and Emperor Napoleon gave her gifts as tokens of his admiration. In 1851 she became a star attraction at the Great Exhibition in London, where she was seen by two hundred thousand astonished visitors over the course of two years. After her British triumph, she ventured to America, where she was greeted by equally great acclaim. “There has not been for years so great a curiosity to be seen in Boston,” one American paper effused, “and we are told that it has been found difficult at times to accommodate the large concourse of persons who throng the hall to behold the bearded lady.”
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All the excitement was over a woman who, in the words of the normally restrained British journal the
Quarterly Review
, sported “a most glorious specimen” of a beard that “shamed any man’s that we have ever seen.”
39
P. T. Barnum, the great entertainment entrepreneur, knew a moneymaker when he saw it and immediately hired Clofullia to be exhibited at his American Museum in New York. She was his first bearded lady, a type of exhibit that would remain a fixture of his museum and circus shows until well after his death in 1891.

Today, the bearded lady is a faded cliché, and it is hard to imagine why dignitaries like Louis Napoleon, not to mention the public at large, were so fascinated by them. But in the mid-nineteenth century, as during the Renaissance, interest in beards ran high, and with it interest in bearded women. Once again, facial hair had attained great social importance, and bearded women became a fascinating intellectual and psychological challenge. Madame Clofullia and others like her were offered large sums to put themselves on display in fairs and stage shows throughout Europe and America, the demand so exceeding the supply of genuine bearded women that several men made careers of impersonating
them. As in the Renaissance, bearded women were generally accepted as genuine women. That was not really the issue.
40
The question was how a woman could possess a usually reliable symbol of manliness. For the latter half of the nineteenth century, bearded women were a puzzle that demanded explanation.

When Barnum hired Madame Clofullia, he understood very well how she could generate shock and excitement. To stir it up still more, he hired a man to stand up at one of her shows, proclaim that she was a man in disguise, denounce Barnum as a humbug, and demand his money back. Barnum then challenged the man to sue him, which, of course, he did. Excited crowds and newspapermen gathered at court to witness the testimony of the bearded woman’s husband and father, as well as three physicians who were invited to examine her in private. The husband testified that he was Madame Clofullia’s legal husband, and that she was the mother of his two children. The eminent doctors agreed that she was indeed a woman, and Barnum reveled in his staged legal vindication.
41
Many years later, when Barnum took his circus to London, he had a new bearded lady, Annie Jones, but the challenge for the audience remained the same: was she really a man? The London
Times
was almost incredulous, reporting that were it not for “Mr. Barnum’s well-known professional rectitude,” Jones “might be taken for a young man of somewhat effeminate cast.”
42
Forced to accept that Clofullia and Jones were women, the nineteenth-century public cast them as freaks of nature to be ogled with the rest of their sideshow cohort, which in Barnum’s show came to include a dwarf, a pair of giants, and skeletally thin man.

As aberrations of nature, bearded women provoked surprise and pity, but they also affirmed the natural order of things.
43
Just as midgets and giants reassured the majority of their normality, bearded women had the ironic effect of confirming the essential masculinity of beards. They were the exception that proved the rule. The shock of their oddity reminded everyone of how important norms were to happiness and good order. If anything, men would be even more inclined to prove they could produce facial hair, while women would be more determined to remove any vestige of their own, lest they themselves be considered freaks.
44
This feminine fear was no idle worry, for women with facial hair were widely regarded as deficient as women, even (or especially) by physicians who made a living helping them remove it. One American electrolysis specialist theorized in the 1890s that most of his hairy patients were unmarried women who suffered from “the inactivity of the uterus.”
45
With the stigma of inadequate femininity looming over them, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resorted to desperate measures. Despite being painful, expensive, and
time-consuming, electrolysis emerged in the 1870s as the chief weapon against nature’s imperfections.

Some women voiced objections to the craze for gender conformity. Annie Jones, the star bearded lady of the Barnum and Bailey Circus during the 1880s and 1890s, called a news conference in 1899 to protest the “freak” label ascribed to her and her fellow performers. She insisted that they should be referred to as “specialty artists” who “were created differently from the human family as the latter exist today, and that . . . in the opinion of many, some of us are really the development of a higher type, and are superior persons, inasmuch as some of us are gifted with extraordinary attributes not apparent in ordinary beings.”
46
Whether this reflected a new self-respect on the part of the “specialty artists” or was merely a way for the circus to provoke interest in its performers—or both—is not really clear. What is certain is that interest in “freaks” had seriously declined by this time, along with the beard movement itself. The enduring legacy of freak shows is their reinforcement of the fiction of natural norms. The “bearded lady” may be gone, but not the notion that female facial hair is abnormal and rare; as one recent researcher has noted, the shame of female body hair persists as “the last taboo.”
47

Meanwhile, urbane men had worries of their own, particularly clergymen, professors, writers, artists, and physicians, whose success relied on seemingly feminine qualities of sensitivity, care, and feeling. Because neither their labors nor their products were physical, they had the hardest time affirming the “natural” masculinity of their work. What was more, women were clearly capable writers, artists and caregivers. It is no wonder, then, that professional men were the most loyal adherents of the beard movement from its beginning to its dying days, and sometimes even beyond that. No one better illustrates the meaning of facial hair for cerebral men than the British painter Luke Fildes.