After shave: a cultural history of female body hair removal in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain

This thesis examines how the ritual of hair removal has become inherently tied to the process of ‘becoming’ female in contemporary Britain. The association between hairlessness and female sexual and gender identity is explored using an interdisciplinary approach, calling upon medical history, feminist media and cultural studies, art history and social history to consider how the norm of hairlessness has taken shape in the everyday lives of women. In so doing, this thesis considers both the prescription and the practice of body hair removal, in that it is concerned with both the experience of hair removal and how this has transformed over the twentieth century, and how women have and continue to negotiate the multiple sources of ‘expertise’ that have shaped what it means to depilate. This has been facilitated by a mixed methodological approach, based around the combined use and re-use of oral history interviews and testimonies from the Mass Observation Project, alongside the analysis of ‘prescriptive’ discourses such as women’s lifestyle magazines, soft core pornography, medical journals, and feminist publications. Such an approach brings focus to the way cultural norms circulate through both networks and texts, but also assists in treating sympathetically the contradictions of feelings and attitudes to hair removal by privileging the voices of women themselves. As a case study, the seemingly mundane practice of female body hair removal exposes the deeply rooted assumptions around race, class, age and sex that continue to underpin ordinary aspects of female identity-production. This thesis offers one approach to the question of how we might historicise women’s complicated relationship with their bodies, asking how personal and individual processes of embodiment and resistance connect and relate to wider public structures of meaning-making.