After decades of theorising about the historical significance of the body, gender historians have only recently begun to consider hair.1 By contrast, psychological, anthropological and sociological researchers have for seventy years investigated hair’s cultural significance. As historians move forward into this new field of study, they stand to benefit from a consideration of this social scientific legacy. In an earlier work, I traced the history of beards in the West from ancient times to the present.2 In this chapter, I will consider the extent to which this history confirms or conflicts with social scientific theories of hair, and in so doing, elucidate some helpful principles to guide further research in the history of gender , hair and the body.
This chapter offers four fundamental observations. The first is that beard history confirms an anthropological hypothesis that cultural understandings of hair are deep-seated and durable, and that control of hair reflects social control more generally. Second, beard history confirms a sociological theory that a primary social purpose of hair is to communicate contrasting social and ideological identities , with the important caveat that hair has often been used to establish contrasts between past and present, as well as between social groups . Over the long span of history, variations of facial hair have reflected periodic reconsiderations of masculine identity . Third , beard history illustrates and amends the sociological concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity ’ advanced by Raewyn Connell and others.3 A fourth and final conclusion is that the history of beards and shaving underscores and extends the argument of historians George Mosse and Christopher Forth that modern men have relied heavily on the idealised male body as the source of authentic and authoritative manliness.4
The Search for Subconscious Meaning
Our survey of social science begins with Sigmund Freud , whose theories inspired a string of scholarly investigations into the meaning of hair. On a few occasions, Freud identified female hair with the phallus. He argued, for example, that neurotics who expressed an urge to cut woman’s hair were enacting a symbolic castration .5 In his discussion of the myth of Medusa , Freud also interpreted Medusa’s serpent hairdo as a representation of castration . The horror of Medusa , he insisted, is rooted in the fear of castration that a boy develops when he discovers that his mother has pubic hair, but no penis . Medusa’s hair of serpents (penises) is the subconscious restoration of the absent penis with phallic pubic hair. Medusa thus produces fear by presenting the spectre of castration , but the stiffness she (and pubic hair) causes in men is also an erection, and thus a reassurance for the terrified man that he still has a penis .6
It is a strange fact that Freud, though a bearded man himself, offered no similar psychosexual interpretation of the beard, or of male hair in general. His only comment, in his discussion of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses , was a rather bland affirmation of the beard as a noble ‘masculine adornment.’7 Ironically, it may be precisely because he was bearded that he ignored the psychology of beards . When Carl Jung , Freud’s greatest protégé, broke his association with the old master in 1912, he accused Freud of blindness to his own neuroses, particularly the fear of younger men like Jung contradicting or surpassing him. ‘For sheer obsequiousness,’ Jung declared in a letter to the older man, ‘nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyze the analyst instead of himself.’8 In Jung’s thinking, Freud’s beard became emblematic of his self-proclaimed roles as prophet and domineering father. Freud may well have avoided analysing the meaning of beards in order to avoid contemplating his own choice of personal symbolism.
Freud’s reticence did not, of course, prevent his successors from venturing down this untrodden path. In his 1951 volume, The Unconscious Significance of Hair , English psychotherapist Charles Berg pronounced a general law:
When we attend, preserve, or love our hair, we are expressing in displaced form our appreciation of, and pleasure in, our genital sexuality . When we remove, cut, or control our hair we are giving expression to reaction formations against the genital (and anal) libido . Both forms of activity are necessary to express both sides of the sexual conflict.9
This formulation prompted Berg to wonder whether men shaved their faces to please women , or rather, to renounce the Oedipal desire for the mother.10
Berg further theorised that growing a beard indicated masculine aggression, as in the case of military men, or an attempt to compensate for unconscious feelings of femininity: ‘In such cases,’ he wrote, ‘the beard is a compensation for unconscious castration , that is to say a reinstatement of the penis .’11 This conclusion seems straightforward enough, except that Berg also entertained the Freudian idea that the beard, like Medusa’s hair, might also represent female pubic hair. Beards , after all, can take on the aspect of hair surrounding a vulva.12 This interpretation led Berg towards a rather contradictory supposition that a man might grow a beard not to assert the penis , but to gratify his ‘unconscious femininity ’. While Berg seemed to relish this sort of Freudian paradox, he did not entertain the equally reasonable possibility that men shaved to avoid, rather than enact, one or another of the contradictory sexual impulses manifest in beards .
Berg’s intriguing, if muddled, interpretation of hair invited other social scientists to take up the challenge. The English anthropologist Edmund Leach believed that the psychosexual meaning of hair was evident in myth as well as cultural practice around the world. His 1958 article ‘Magical Hair’ asserted that there was remarkable consistency of hair symbolism across cultures that pointed to a universal, subconscious equation of hair with genitalia and sexual potency.13 To Leach’s thinking, then, the hair’s role as a stand-in for libido and aggression meant that haircutting was a universal sign of self-denial and appeasement. This, for example, was its role in mourning rituals like those of the Trobriand Islanders , and also for Buddhist and Christian monks , who shaved all or part of their heads to indicate their subservience to divine authority and to their monastic order. Leach believed that a few exceptions in ethnographic studies only proved the general rule: that long hair equated to unrestrained sexuality ; short hair or partially shaved head or tightly bound hair equated to restricted sexuality ; and a close shaven head equated to celibacy .14
In ritual contexts, the cutting of hair was the suppression of the aggressive libido for the benevolent social purpose of placing it under symbolic control. Suppression of sexuality in this way reduced conflicts and promoted social harmony—even between the living and the dead. In many such rituals, moreover, the act of symbolic suppression spared people the need for actual suppression of sexuality , which would lead to neurosis. Such rituals therefore provided the very practical benefit of balancing expression and repression of the libido .
Berg and Leach provided a theoretical starting point for a psychosocial theory of hair that has inform...