bearded

[calimac]

There's been a lot of commentary on beards lately, like this. Possibly generated by Paul Ryan's new beard, or the revelation of the strategically political or commercial beard-growing of the Duck Dodgers Dynasty boys, or the Mast Brothers.

I've looked at the book cited in that article, but it disappointed me. Instead of a history of the beard, it's a collection of portraits of men with beards. What I want is to know not about any individual beard, but about beards in general, their rise and fall, and why. I'm particularly fascinated by the Wave of Beards that swept across Europe and the U.S. in the late 19C. Why did it come? Why did it go? Why was its arrival not met with the obloquy that greeted the very tiny revival of beards in the 1960s and 70s?

I've read possible answers to the first two questions. The previous Wave of Beards, in the Renaissance, disappeared coincident with the arrival of the powdered wig, so perhaps beards were thought a follicle too far. When the wigs went out in the early 19C, facial hair reappeared, first in the form of increasingly elaborate muttonchop whiskers, and then beards.

As for why they disappeared, I've read the simple cynical answer that it was because King Gillette wanted to sell razors. Once he'd sold razors to all the men, in the 1910s he created a new market by inventing women's underarm shaving, previously practiced only by the occasional courtesan.

I'm not sure how accurate or full these explanations are, but if I can't trace the reasons, at least I can gather facts. I have this database of U.S. senators from 1789 on, see, and when the Congressional Biographical Directory added portraits of all the senators (they now have most of the House members, too), I thought: this would be a useful database, large enough to be meaningful but not so large as to be wearisome to compile, of the rise and fall of the beard. Of course it says nothing about when the man grew his beard or whether he always kept it, but it has some value as an approximation. What's striking is the rise and fall of the sideburns (alone, without mustache), the beard, and the mustache (with or without sideburns, but without beard), in that order. It's even visible on as rough an approximation as birth decade:

birth   sideburns beards    mustache   US Presidents (for comparison)
1770s      6%        1%                Harrison (shaven)
1780s     13%        1%                Van Buren (sideburns), Taylor (shaven)
1790s      8%        7%                Tyler (shaven), Polk (shaven), Buchanan (didn't need to shave)
1800s      8%       21%        5%      Fillmore (shaven), Pierce (shaven), Lincoln (beard), Johnson (shaven)
1810s      9%       44%        6%
1820s      4%       67%       15%      Grant (beard), Hayes (beard), Arthur (mustache)
1830s      1%       49%       42%      Garfield (beard), Cleveland (mustache), Harrison (beard)
1840s               27%       46%      McKinley (shaven)
1850s                9%       50%      Roosevelt (mustache), Taft (mustache), Wilson (shaven)
1860s                5%       38%      Harding (shaven)
1870s                          6%      Coolidge (shaven), Hoover (shaven)

After that the mustache continued to trail on in occasional use through men born in the 1910s, but with one exception of 1910s birth (and he didn't actually grow it until around 1970), the beard didn't reappear in the Senate until a very few men born in the 1940s had them.

But note how ubiquitous facial hair was among men serving between the 1860s and 1910s. A third of men born in the 1800s and 1860s wore facial hair, rising above half in the intervening decades, reaching an astonishing height of 91% of those born in the 1830s.

Beards that I see today are most commonly the neatly-trimmed oval around the mouth, like PNH's, and one sees the occasional wildman (which was once respectable), but my aim in a beard is to emulate General Grant. I emphatically do not view my beard as an ornament. I'm not often asked why I grow a beard, but when I am I say, "I don't consider that a meaningful question. The meaningful question is, why do so many other men shave theirs off?" I stopped shaving in college, because I couldn't think of a reason why I should continue wasting my time at it every morning. Consequently I don't shave around the beard either - what other men do is up to them, but to me both shaving and having a beard would be the epitome of pointlessness - but I do keep it short, because cutting it with scissors every couple of weeks is a lot less trouble, and a lot less messy, than having it get in the way all the time. I wash it with soap and water, like the rest of my face. (Only once did I try shampooing it: I had forgotten that the beard lies below the nostrils, and that was a bit much, so another reason to keep it short.) I did shave it off entirely once, about 20 years ago, because I was curious as to what I looked like underneath. I soon grew it back.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I have read that beards were a serious political issue in Russia: Slavophiles and Old Believers had maximal beards, whereas Westernizers went clean shaven in what was considered the "Western" style.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That was in the 18C, and a major political divide it certainly was. But by the late 19C it had died out, and I'm sure that the beard of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, who was born in 1868 at the very end of the 19C-beard generation, had no such connotation.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest, by the way, that it's no less meaningful a question than asking a woman "Why do you shave your legs/armpits/pubes?" But I see that you addressed that one. I see that that campaign was a decade or two before the "Torches of Freedom" publicity stunt that encouraged women to smoke cigarettes—another activity that formerly was associated with courtesans (Lola Montez was the first woman to be photographed with a cigarette); there seems to have been something going around in those decades. . . .

[negothick.livejournal.com]

The simple answer for women shaving is that the fashion revolution after the Great War suddenly exposed to the public gaze many new areas of the female body. Suddenly, women were wearing dresses that revealed armpits and calves. This leaves unanswered the question of why Gillette (or a minion at the company) thought it was disgusting to see hair on these parts--and of how they were able--as if overnight--to convey that disgust to most American women, at least.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Aesthetic preference for infantilized women?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've seen arguments over whether removing body hair infantilizes a woman's appearance. My reading is that they're trying to look infantile but failing (since most grown women, even with the body hair removed, look nothing like a prepubescent girl), and it's the failed attempt at trying that's so repellent.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There apparently are men who feel otherwise. Many years ago, at Comic-Con, I remarked to a group of other attendees on preferring women who haven't removed their body hair, and they all went "Eww." The striking thing was that they were all furry fans.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Long years back, I was showing a teenage friend around the Lit and Phil, which is a private library in Newcastle and my favourite place on the planet; and I took her up into the gallery of old-and-rarely-borrowed-books, and flung my hand out at random saying "One of the lovely things about this place, you can fling your hand out at random and find something fascinating" - and pulled off the shelf Beards: an Omnium Gatherum by Reginald Reynolds. And was instantly fascinated, and took it home and read it avidly, and it became my Favourite Book: and it really is a social history of the beard, by one of those classic eccentric British scholars. It's delightful and informative both at once. And I thought I was the only person on the planet who had read it, but I was at a dinner party some while later and had barely begun holding forth about it before one of the other guests said "Oh, is that Beards: an Omnium Gatherum by Reginald Reynolds? It's in the Brasenose college library, and it went around my whole year like wildfire..."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And published, I see, by Allen and Unwin at about the same time that they were ruminating over The Lord of the Rings, another book by one of those classic eccentric British scholars. There are libraries around here that have it, so I'll take a look.

[And I see that he followed up his book on Beards with a book on Beds. Is this believable?]

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Heh. I had not seen that. Perhaps he was merely narrowing his field of interest, losing unnecessary letters?