It’s that time of the year again when the weather starts getting colder and your typical outfit of the day consists of a jacket and pants. I don’t know about you, but that also means that shaving becomes less and less of an everyday routine for me. I get a break from dry legs and an irritated bikini line and no one will even realize. But the fact that I get joy out of not shaving every day got me questioning why we even shave in the first place and why there’s still such a stigma behind women having hairy legs.
As someone who is part Italian, there was no getting out of having excessive and dark body hair. I’ve been hairy my whole life, and it has always been noticeable. I convinced my mom to let me start shaving in the third grade due to the amount of bullying I got in school. It was either showing up to school in jeans even though it was 100 degrees outside or getting to shave and having boys stop comparing their leg hair to mine. Now, about 12 years later, I still feel pressure to have perfectly shaved legs any time my legs are exposed.
To take it back to where this whole shaving thing started, many people have explained that men and women began removing body hair to stay safe from lice and other parasites, especially during times when bathing was not widely available. Also due to the fact that hair causes sweat, it is also known to be a smell and bacteria breeding ground. This led to the early 1900s when being “clean-shaven” meant basic hygiene for men.
Up until then, women’s fashion was primarily long dresses with long sleeves, so leg and armpit hair were never seen by the public. Then along came 1920 when shorter dresses became the newest trend, and a huge marketing opportunity presented itself.
During the start of the twentieth century, manufacturers of safety razors wanted to expand their market and realized that women as a demographic could be a gold mine. They began to promote the idea that body hair on women was inherently masculine and unhygienic. This led to Gillette introducing the first razor marketed for women named the Milady Decollette in 1915.
At this point, however, shaving was still very new and taboo and women had the choice to wear stockings instead, which hid whether or not they had leg hair. This worked all well and dandy until World War II came along and ruined it. The nylon used for making stockings were now used to make parachutes, so stockings were a rare department store find and legs were then truly exposed.
During this period of war, it was culturally important that women kept up their looks to boost morale, and apparently the only way to do that was to have silky smooth legs. If the most desired pin-up models could look perfect and smooth, so should men’s wives. Advertisements went as far as to claim that if women didn’t look their best, they could single-handedly make the war worse. You heard it here first: if we all stop shaving, we might cause World War III.
Basically, like everything else in our lives, media and advertisements shaped the way we live and will continue to for as long as history is being made. Thank you to King Camp Gillette for being annoyingly good at advertising, and thank you to WWII for making women shave.
As time goes on and progressive ideology continues to normalize women having body hair, hopefully, future generations will not feel pressured to shave at such a young age; even better, maybe they won’t ever feel pressured. It is YOUR body and no one should be able to tell you what to do with it. Maybe one day we will finally stop stigmatizing body hair… or, we will cause another World War. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.