Free Femininity by Susan Brownmiller

O. Henry’s tale is an exquisite
     parable of good intentions and crossed purpose and it deserves its place as the ranking
     Christmas story in American literature, but the notion of a hank of hair as a woman’s
     greatest treasure is sad and, frankly, demeaning.
    When F. Scott Fitzgerald published “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in the Saturday Evening Post in 1920, the majority of young women were cutting their hair not for the price it
     could bring or because they were copycats but because they wanted to be free of a
     tiresome bother, yet that is not what Fitzgerald chose to see. Bernice is a simple
     girl from Eau Claire who visits her city cousin Marjorie, a modern, popular flirt.
     To get attention from Marjorie’s fast crowd, Bernice announces that she is going to
     have her hair bobbed at the Sevier Hotel barber shop. Forced to put up or shut up
     by Marjorie, Bernice marches in dread to the barber—even he is aghast—and has her
     “dark brown glory” chopped off. Fitzgerald mourns the results: “Her face’s chief charm
     had been a Madonna-like simplicity. Now that was gone and she was—well, frightfully
     mediocre—not stagy; only ridiculous, like a Greenwich Villager who had left her spectacles
     at home.” Bernice had been had. She goes home to Eau Claire, but not before she performs
     her act of revenge. While Marjorie is asleep Bernice takes a pair of scissors and
     snips off her cousin’s blonde braids.
    Female competition and flapper confusion are Fitzgerald’s themes, but he and O. Henry
     turn their tales on a deeper message: the tragedy of a young woman who foolishly discards
     her greatest asset. Romantic sentiment over the nature of feminine beauty is the heart
     of the matter. If one doesn’t feel that short hair is a tragic feminine loss, the
     stories lose much of the poignant drama.
    Decades before O. Henry and Fitzgerald put their words to paper, Louisa May Alcott
     used the drama of shorn female tresses in Little Women (1868). Her heroine and alter ego, Jo March, sells her long, thick hair so her mother
     can travel to her sick father’s bedside. Meg, Beth, Amy and Marmee are full of tender
     compassion, for coltish, plain Jo has sacrificed her “one beauty.” Jo has her arguments
     marshaled. Her head feels “deliciously light” and cool and soon she will have “a curly
     crop which will be boyish, becoming, and easy to keep in order.” But even sturdy Jo
     is not immune to the sense of feminine loss, and we know that “boyish” is a loaded
     word. Late that night Meg hears her sister stifle a sob.
    “Jo, dear, what is it? Are you crying about Father?”
    “No, not now.”
    “What then?”
    “My—my hair!”
    Meg comforts, Jo rallies, but privately Meg holds to her opinion that Jo’s cropped
     head “looked comically small on her tall sister’s shoulders.” Meg’s reservations illustrate
     the unwritten rule of compensatory femininity and the esthetic ideal. If Jo had been
     shorter, prettier and more graceful, the boyish trim might not have been such a disaster.
     It might even have looked adorable on someone like Meg, whose “lady” credentials were
     in order.
    Bernice cuts her hair to be modern and popular with boys, Delia performs the sacrificial
     act to buy her husband a present, Jo March cuts and sells her “one beauty” to help
     her father and the family’s finances, but Alcott at least allows her heroine to argue
     that short hair is a real advantage—it is “deliciously light” and “easy to keep in
     order.”
    When women with braided coils that had not been cut since childhood arrived at the
     emotional decision to get rid of and be done with them, they needed to supply the
     men in their lives with an explanation for what was taken as a rash, destructive gesture.
     Practicality and manageability, they argued. Health and cleanliness, they protested.
     Sticky pomades and greasy dressings made long hair a hospitable nest for dirt, soot
     and head