mystery of beards

[calimac]

The 7/28 New Yorker has a review of a book, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in 19th Century America by Sarah Gold McBride, that has not one but two insufficient explanations for the question I've only previously seen entirely different insufficient explanations for, namely what was the cause of the Wave of Beards that settled on the faces of most middle-to-upper-class European and American men in the mid 19th century?

McBride's first explanation is that it was an attempt to show white male virility in the face of the rise of the supposedly emasculating suffragist movement. Besides being inane (as noted by the reviewer, Margaret Talbot: "Did men really need beards to remind anyone that they were in charge?"), this explanation doesn't fit chronologically, as the suffragist movement was an odd minor cause at the time the Wave of Beards began. It became a major public movement at the time that the beards were going away.

McBride's second explanation is white men fearing African American barbers with straight razors. Whatever you might think of that as an explanation in the US (I place it in the "inane" category), it wouldn't apply in Europe, yet the Wave of Beards settled on faces there too.

I noticed an error which I'm not sure if it is McBride's or Talbot's. Talbot writes that "J.D. Vance is the first Vice-President since the nineteenth century to wear a beard while in office." That's not quite true. While there were 5 Presidents with beards in the olden days, there were only 2 such Vice-Presidents: Schuyler Colfax (1869-1873) and Charles W. Fairbanks (1905-1909). So, not quite 19th century.

Comments

[sartorias]

Inane, yes. I'd first be delving for charismatic or socially prominent fashion leaders. Many changes in fashion are fairly easy to peg: Beau Brummel and his well-fitted blue coat and perfectly arranged cravat. Queen Elizabeth in that weird boxy skirt and the stuffed sleeves divided by the deep V stomacher to hide her increasing girth. Madame Pompadour, the high wigs to draw attention from her unaristocratically low forehead, etc etc etc. There's no doubt some king or general or PM sporting face fungus that got everyone copying him, which rung outward for a time. I think that was also the period in which men's square-toed boots had to turn up a bit. I remember reading a mid-century letter from some ordinary guy repeating the conversation in a room where a bunch of young officers sat on benches about the room with their boot toes pressed against the walls to train the leather to get that fashionable lift. They filled the room with cigar smoke as they nattered.

[calimac]

Even the 'fashion leaders' principle can be done badly. I've read another book on beards that attributes their popularity to following Louis Napoleon and Walt Whitman. They were early adopters, yes, but outside France few followed Napoleon's style of beard, and I've always understood that Whitman was considered an eccentric by his contemporaries, not someone to be emulated.

[oursin]

Was that my acquaintance Alun Withey's Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England 1650–1900 (2021)? - blog post summarising some of his arguments here.

[calimac]

No, it was Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair by Christopher Oldstone-Moore (University of Chicago Press, 2016). In writing about it, I mentioned that "Previous books I've seen on the topic of facial hair consisted of little more than cumulative anecdotes about individual beard-wearers." From his blog post, Withey seems more forest-than-trees than that, but I hope he doesn't just repeat O-M's theory about Napoleon III and Whitman.

[sartorias]

Yes! Or, the finger points in the wrong direction. There's a Connie Willis story out that touches on this. I forget the title and even the gist except it concerned the mysterious shifts of fashion that no one can quantify, but when I read it, I remember thinking that if she'd done more research she would have realized that nope, in this case the finger pointed straight at Coco Chanel.

Poking About

[goatgodschild]

I am glad that I was not the only person to think that McBride's proposed explanations were quite poor.