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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“In February 1924, Illustreret Fagblad for danske Damefrisorer, one of the leading trade journals for Danish women's hairdressers, reported that short haircuts for women were becoming increasingly common throughout most of Europe. Although the trend had not yet reached Denmark, it was likely to do so, the journal predicted, since "we have seen within the last couple of months the first signs of .. . shorn hair here in Copenhagen." The prediction proved correct. In July 1925, Ugens Spejl, another trade journal, reported that the new fashion was spreading "like fire in old houses." That same year, the president of the Ladies' Hairdressers Association estimated that 25 percent of Copenhagen's female population had their hair cut short.

The following year, one Copenhagen barber claimed that no less than 75 percent of women under the age of 30 had adopted the new styles, leading the editor of yet another trade journal, Danmarks Barber-og Frisortidende to conclude that "there is something almost epidemically contagious about the advancing shingling. Each and everyone who lets her locks fall for the scissors immediately draws four or five others with her." Although contemporaries may have exaggerated the numbers, contemporary street photography and surviving photo albums suggest that a significant number of young women did in fact dispose of their long hair in the second half of the 1920s.

It is also telling that no fewer than 48 of the 59 women interviewed for this project recalled having their hair cut short before 1930. As Anne Bruun explained many years later, "That was just what you did. If you were young and wanted to be in style, that was definitely the look. Anybody who wanted to be up-to-date did that." Helene Berg agreed. "Short hair made you look chic, made you look modern," she claimed. Besides, as Louise Ege pointed out, short hair "kind of fit with the other things that were fashionable. Short dresses and all that." But despite their enthusiasm for the new hairstyles, actually acquiring one of the fashionable bobs was not always easy. While the number of beauty salons had been growing since the turn of the century, women's hairdressers generally shied away from providing their female customers with the short haircuts they desired.

For decades women's hairdressers had worked hard to create a respectable female profession by promoting themselves as specialists in hygiene and conventional feminine beauty, an accomplishment they were not willing to sacrifice by embracing the controversial new styles. Moreover, since most hairdressers were only used to working with combs, brushes, and curlers, few were actually competent to cut hair. As a result, many women had to enter male barbershops to have their hair cut, a step many took with considerable trepidation. The difficulties of finding a stylist both willing and able to cut a woman's hair was not the only obstacle to a fashionable appearance. Many fathers and husbands explicitly prohibited the new styles. Others let their disapproval be known more indirectly.

As Magda Gammelgaard Jensen recalled, "I really wanted to get my hair [cut] short, but I didn't know how to go about it. It wasn't so easy when there was a man around." According to Mr. H. M. Christensen, the president of the Danish Grooming, Toilet and Sanitary Workers' Union, many women therefore chose to "have their hair cut at a time when their husbands and fathers [were] not at home." Outside the private sphere, other forces also strove to contain "that unfortunate tendency among young ladies to shear their hair." Some workplaces openly discriminated against women who adhered to the new fashion. Several prominent department stores did not hire women who sported the new hairstyles. Others fired employees after a visit to the hairdresser.

In 1924, the personnel director at Crome & Goldschmidt, one of the leading clothing stores in Copenhagen, flatly declared that he "would absolutely not engage or employ any young woman with bobbed hair." Other businesses had similar policies. The president of Salomon David Jr. Inc., Inger Diemer, explained that she had "banned bobbed hair." "I demand," she continued, "that the women who work with us, sign [a contract] that they will not wear short hair. In my mind, that is not proper in an old, highly esteemed firm." The director of Bispebjerg Hospital, Charlotte Munck, also banned short hair for all nurses under her supervision.

Even women in less publicly visible occupations faced ostracism if they chose to adopt the modern styles. Inger Mangart, for example, who worked as a part-time cleaning assistant in a private home in the late 1920s, recalled being dismissed the first day she arrived with short hair. The press was equally adamant in its stance against the new styles. To discourage young women from following fashion, newspapers and popular magazines delighted in sensationalist stories about domestic turmoil caused by short hair. Divorces, physical abuse, family disintegration, and even murders were described as tragic, but predictable, outcomes of women's changed appearances.

Assuming, however, that young women were more likely to follow fashion prescription than sensible guidance, journalists and other commentators figured that the most efficient way to combat the modern styles was simply to declare them unfashionable. "Bobbed hair is no longer in style," one beauty advice columnist thus warned as early as 1922, several years before the new styles hit Denmark. "We hardly have to repeat that bobbed hair has already received the death sentence abroad," another fashion expert claimed that same year. "There is no doubt that this fad, the short hair, is coming to an end," Ugebladet asserted a couple of years later, and in 1925, B.T. was pleased to report that "all countries now agree that the fashion of short hair is finally on the retreat."

Yet despite these elaborate efforts to suppress the new haircuts, women's enthusiasm did not wane. Many critics therefore felt compelled to explain the dangers of the new styles in the hope that young women would be swayed by their arguments. Some journalists and beauty advice columnists sought to discourage young women from having their hair cut through use of the kind of racist imagery that permeated early twentieth century European culture. By labeling the new styles "Hottentot hair" or "Apache cuts," they strove to impress upon young women the incompatibility of short hair with refined Western womanhood. "Surely, no young lady wants to look like a monkey," one reporter thus argued, apparently hoping that young women would recognize the similarity between women's short hair and animal fur.

Other observers claimed that short hair simply made women look ugly and unattractive. Cutting one's hair was therefore inevitably at the risk of losing "the man's admiration and desire." Although some men admitted that a short-haired woman might serve "as a drinking buddy," those who participated in the public debate all insisted that the new styles did not mix with marriage and motherhood, implying that short-haired women could expect to live out their lives as spinsters and old maids— an argument that presumably would dissuade any young woman from such reckless behavior. While most female critics tended to focus on the aesthetic aspects of the new styles, it was quite different considerations that fueled much of the vehement male opposition.

Like many other people in the early twentieth century, these commentators believed there was a direct correlation between external appearance and internal self. When a woman cut her hair, she was not only defying conventional standards of femininity but was also prone to develop some of those mental traits that usually characterized people with short hair—namely, men. As Ludvig Brandt-Meller, a male hairdresser who opposed the new styles, explained, "Short hair tends to emancipate the woman. It is as if it affects her psychologically." Others found that short-haired women became "like men in character and gestures," insisting that "that 99 out of 100 women with short hair have simultaneously acquired boyish or mannish manners."'

A few alarmists saw even greater dangers ahead. The very act of cutting a woman's hair, they argued, would eventually alter a woman's biological constitution and turn her into a man. Believing that the mass of hair on a human body was constant, some argued that short hair would necessarily cause women to grow beards. Others predicted the advent of female baldness. "The evidence is right there, since 60 percent of all men over forty [who presumably had cut their hair since childhood] are bald, while less than 0.1 percent of all women [who had never previously cut their hair] suffer from this weakness," another critic of the new styles explained.

While men had tended to object to short dresses because they rendered women too attractive, their reactions to short hair were therefore quite different. According to male critics, short hair "emancipated" women and made then unwomanly, even masculine, and not attractive enough, a violation of gender norms that seemed to them much graver and ultimately more unpleasant than women being overly sexy and seductive. Even those who did not necessarily believe that short hair would actually turn women into men found this quite disturbing because, as one correspondent wrote to the editor of the newspaper B.T. in 1925, "If there is something we men cannot stand, it is precisely women void of femininity. "

Young women's seeming disregard of men's opinions about the new styles only made matters worse. Apparently, young women were no longer pursuing physical beauty and style for the purposes of male pleasure and admiration. How, then, were men to understand women's enthusiasm for short hair as anything but a sign that women cared less about male approval than about their own "emancipation"? Some even feared that the popularity of the new styles might indicate an explicit sexual and emotional detachment from men. In comparison with those who defended short dresses when they first appeared, supporters of the new hairstyles were therefore faced with a much more difficult task.

The opposition to women's short hair was much fiercer than the opposition to short dresses had ever been, as short hair connoted emancipation, female defiance, and rebellion against men's judgment in a way that short skirts never had. During this entire controversy, the voices of women who cut their hair were rarely heard in public. Under heavy fire, most young women seemingly preferred to avoid the discursive battles that raged around them. On the few occasions that any of these women did speak up, they generally adopted a very cautious stance, seeking to diffuse the opposition by reassuring critics of their whole-hearted commitment to femininity and respectable womanhood.

In 1925, one young woman who described herself as "old-fashioned" despite her short hair thus sought to counter criticisms of the new styles by denying that there was any link between appearance and identity. "Why in the world should a young girl not be equally feminine and good whether she has bobbed hair or long hair?," she wondered. "It does, after all, not change the nature of the young girl to have her hair cut off." More often, young women simply tried to skirt criticisms by emphasizing the very pragmatic concerns that allegedly had led them to the barbershop. "Much can be said both for and against the bobbed hair, but the fact that it is a practical way of wearing one's hair, nobody can deny," one woman argued.

Nonetheless, the relative silence on the part of the women who wore the new hairstyles did not mean that no voices were raised in their defense. Complicating the picture of vocal male opponents and a largely silent group of female supporters, the chief public advocates of short hair for women in the 1920s were in fact male barbers. Not that barbers were a particularly fashion-conscious bunch or especially committed to young women's right to determine their own appearance. These men simply saw the new styles as a means to propel their profession out of the crisis in which it had lingered for decades.

The rise of the medical and dental professions had dealt the first blow to the former surgeon-barbers, eliminating what had been the most profitable areas of their occupation. Later, when men began to shave themselves rather than frequenting the barber twice or three times weekly, the financial base of most barbershops had been further undercut, and scattered attempts at cultivating new areas of business expertise such as facial massage and manicure had contributed only little to their economy.

In this context, the fashionable new styles for women seemed a god-send for barbers eager to cultivate both a new clientele and new sources of income, and since women's hairdressers generally opposed the short hairstyles and most often refused to cut women's hair, barbers were left with the uncontested responsibility for providing young women with the look they desired. Of course, barbers were not oblivious to the offense women's short hair provoked or the wrath they might incur by accommodating female customers.

It was therefore in their own best interest to counter the opposition, and toward that end they adopted the same strategy that fashion advocates had successfully used a few years earlier, namely, to attempt to disassociate short hair from any kind of subversive intentions on the part of women. Short hair, they insisted, had nothing to do with defiance of feminine conventions or even modern fashions. It was a style adopted for reasons of comfort, ease, and practicality only. "It is not the senseless mimicking of fashion follies that has led women to allow their hair to be cut off," one barber thus insisted in 1926. "Rather, it is the natural development in all social strata that has forced the women to choose a practical hairstyle."

To give credibility to this claim, barbers traced the origins of women's short hair not to feminist rebels or decadent fashions, but to that highly respectable, self-sacrificing female heroine, Florence Nightingale. "When a war begins," one writer explained, "masses of younger and older women who wish to be nurses in the army immediately sign up. The healthiest among them are selected, and the first step on the road to their new vocation is to cut their hair as short as men's, first, because the daily care takes too long time, and secondly, because a nurse cannot run around with a zoo of carnivores [sicl] in her long hair." Upon their return, the reasoning continued, admirers adopted similar hair styles.

Although there was little historical evidence to support such an explanation—after all, Florence Nightingale's reputation had been established during the Crimean War almost three quarters of a century earlier, and few women had followed her example in the intervening years —this argument had several advantages. First, it disassociated short hair from any kind of female defiance. Second, it sought to ground the popularity of the new hairstyles in admirable, patriotic concerns. And third, it tied short hair to notions of health and hygiene. From the mid-1920s, particularly the latter, combined with arguments about the practical requirements of the labor market, formed the core in the defense of women's short hair.

In addition, barbers also sought to address anxieties over the seeming dissipation of gender differences by calling attention to the cultural and historical versatility of hair styles. In an article entitled "Masculine Girl Hair and Feminine Boy Hair," the author set out to prove that "women have not been 'the long-haired sex' for as long as we believe." A sampling of Greek, Roman, and Persian traditions led him to conclude that "long hair appears just as frequently on men as on women when one examines history, which is why hair has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual character."

Just as long hair did not make men less masculine, short hair would not eradicate women's femininity. In fact, some argued, it held the potential of actually heightening it by drawing attention to women's fine facial features. "The shape of the face, the beauty of the skin, as well as the soft lines of the neck" were accentuated by short hair, one barber wrote, poetically comparing a woman's face to a "painting [that] is also seen more clearly in a simple frame." In the case of modern dresses, fashion advocates had gradually managed to convince most critics of their compatibility with conventional womanhood. Short hair fared differently.

Short, simple haircuts for women never gained acceptance in the 1920s, at least not among the men and women who publicly expressed their opinions. The controversy over women's hair only died down at the end of the decade, when a new, modified style of short hair became popular. Ironically, this new short style, which eventually appeased critics, emerged from the beauty salon run by women's hairdressers. Having been entirely unsuccessful in their attempts to coax women into preserving their long hair and eager to regain some of the professional territory lost to barbers, women's hairdressers found themselves forced to dispense with their rejection of the short fashions.

Still unwilling, however, to embrace the bobbed look, they devised a new strategy. Arguing that short hair unfortunately had been "carried to extremes... by the less cultivated segments of the female population" and was sported by "each and every factory and shop-girl," (middle-class) women were offered a chance to distinguish themselves as "finer ladies" through "feminine and graceful styles with curls and waves" while they were waiting for their hair to grow out again. By fashioning themselves as aides to women concerned with the reestablishment of their femininity and by presenting their care for short hair as a form of damage control, hairdressers were able to legitimize their growing interest in women's new hairstyles.

With relatively few ideological scruples they were therefore able to plunge into this profitable market during the last years of the 1920s, gradually recapturing the patronage of most women. However, that women left the barbershop and (re)turned to the beauty salon did not indicate that long hair was regaining its popularity. Fashionable hairstyles for women remained short for the rest of the decade. What did change was the way short hair actually looked. Female hairdressers, one fashion columnist noted with applause, did "everything to give the short style a more feminine air than earlier."

Permanent waves and curls, artificial hair pieces, decorative combs, ribbons, and barrettes all contributed to this goal. This new, feminized version of short hair quickly gained popularity among women interested in variation and possibly weary of public hostility. Within just a few years the original simple, straight styles had virtually been abandoned. Customers, one hairdresser noted with pleasure in 1927, now wanted "to become more feminine, not with completely long hair, but with longer short hair, enough to be curly in the back and around the face .. . so that the repulsive boyish head becomes beautified and more feminine."

Thus, after a brief but troubling intermission where women's adoption of short hair seemed to be blurring gender differences, new curlier versions of bobbed hair marked the reestablishment of gender distinctions in fashionable self-presentation. Even though women continued to cut their hair, the clear stylistic differences between short hair for men and short hair for women soothed critics, and gradually their opposition faded. With their confidence in the stability of sexual difference restored, some of the harshest opponents were even able to admit a few years later that they actually found short hair quite charming and attractive—if not on their wives, then at least on their daughters.”

- Birgitte Soland, “The Emergence of the Modern Look.” in Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

#becoming modern #birgitte soland #danish #fashion #hair #1920s #history

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