Free Femininity by Susan Brownmiller Page A

lice, and thorough washings were infrequent and troublesome, particularly
     for the urban poor who lived in infested tenements and shared a communal tub and sink.
     But even beyond the problems of hygiene there were other vexations a bob might cure.
     Freedom from hairpins, freedom from holding combs, freedom from rats (the irksome
     rolls of wire mesh that supported the upsweep), freedom from switches (the storebought
     pieces that filled out a thin coiffure), freedom from fear of a strong gust of wind,
     freedom from boring, repetitive hours spent washing and drying and brushing and combing
     and dressing and braiding and pinning and winding and curling on damnable rags, and
     freedom, simply, from a heavy, burdensome load.
    But the men, so proprietary about women’s hair, were not easily won over. They howled
     in rage. And although the issuewas cast by feminists in practical terms—Charlotte Perkins Gilman took to the lecture
     circuit to champion short hair as sensible and sanitary—it was glamour in the person
     of Irene Castle that probably caused a national change of mind. When America’s favorite
     dancing partner cut her hair and wrapped a string of pearls around her forehead, the
     daring act became the Castle Clip, and suddenly short hair was romantic, chic and
     very classy.
    Irene Castle claimed full credit for the short-hair craze. “I believe I am largely
     blamed for the homes wrecked and engagements broken because of clipped tresses,” she
     gaily wrote in the Ladies’ Home Journal, taking care to warn her readers that the new style was not for every head—an older,
     graying woman might look “a bit kittenish and not quite dignified”—and she cautioned
     that “rather small features also help.” Castle was rich and famous, a glamorous star
     for whom the ordinary rules did not apply, but for women who could not dance their
     way to economic independence the bob still was fraught with role rebellion.
    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who had rescued herself from a life of neurasthenic invalidism,
     was among the first to understand. Herland, her feminist Utopian novel of 1915, told of an athletic, happy, all-female society
     where everyone wore her hair short, “some few inches at most … all light and clean
     and freshlooking.” A male visitor to Herland complains, “If only their hair were long,
     they would look so much more feminine,” but in the wonderful manner of Utopian fiction
     he is quickly converted.
    In March of 1916 Gilman addressed the Working Women’s Protective Union in New York
     City with these words: “It was not the Lord who gave men short hair while women’s
     is long,” she told her audience. “It was the scissors. I am not asking you to go home
     and cut your hair, though I think we would all be much cleaner and happier and more
     comfortable with it short. You wouldn’t do it anyway. But I do ask you if this isn’t
     a joke: If a woman—who has no more natural reason for wearing her hair long than a
     man—goes and cuts it off, people say, ‘Oh, shame: she wants to be a man!’ But what
     do they say when the case isreversed? Whiskers are a man’s natural prerogative, but now when he shaves off his
     whiskers and goes with a smooth face, why don’t they say to him, ‘You want to look
     like a woman!’”
    Charlotte Gilman had taken on convention, and the following day The New York Times took on Mrs. Gilman. “City Sends Up Mighty Protest Against the Fiat That Beauty Should
     Be Cropped,” the Times headlined, continuing, “Sounds End of Romance/History, Literature, and Poetry Must
     Be Made Over to Meet Mrs. Gilman’s Proposal.” The satirical piece, run as straight
     news, pretended to quote the man in the street: “Women’s beauty is in her hair, and
     it’s her first duty to be good-looking.” There was also a waggish response from a
     barber: “If a woman needs a haircut she may need a shave.” Citing “great opposition
     among milliners,”