When women started shaving

Dear Matthew Alice: Could you clear up an argument? I commented that during the love scene in The Piano, it was not authentic for Holly Hunter to have nicely shaved legs. After all, it’s a Victorian-era movie. — Wendy Morris, O.B.

Men and women have tweezed, plucked, and scraped various patches of body hair since the beginning of time. (Imagine cutting through the stubble every morning with a chipped flint or sharpened clam shell.) Sometimes it was fashionable to be furry, sometimes not. Ancient Egyptians learned early on that shaving one’s pits cut down on body odor, so shaving something other than one’s beard or head dates back at least that far. But the history of women’s depilation isn’t very well documented. There are always exceptions, but it’s unlikely a Victorian woman would have shaved her legs, since proper women of that time theoretically weren’t even supposed to have legs. They certainly were covered with plenty of bloomers, petticoats, skirts, and high-button shoes. Even table and chair legs were modestly covered during that era, and the word “leg” was avoided in polite conversation. According to the Schick company’s history of shaving, women in America began regularly shaving their armpits (coyly referred to as “smoothing”) in the second decade of the 20th Century, when safety razors replaced the old straight razor and fashions became more revealing. As hemlines rose, “modern” women began to shave their legs too, to complement their sheer silk hose. With stockings virtually unavailable during World War II, even more women began shaving their legs and applying leg make-up.

Historically, men of sophisticated societies began shaving their beards to give their enemies in combat one less thing to grab. But fashions and taboos about women’s body hair have had a subtler, more erotic history. Hairless women were (are?) imagined as virginal and prepubescent, unshaved women as seductive and earthy. But human hair, no matter where, has been buffeted by the winds of fashion and erotic fantasy.