Free Femininity by Susan Brownmiller Page B

the Times deadpanned, “Makers of combs and hairpins, horse growers who furnish false hair,
     manufacturers of mirrors as well as publishers of style books are expected to organize
     a crusade against Mrs. Gilman’s idea.” From “among the literati at Columbia” came
     the dire prediction that poets “will talk no more of tresses but rather of pompadours
     and shaves.”
    Funny stuff, but a mockery of the question. And beneath the mockery, the real concerns
     of men.
    A woman’s right to wear her hair short, and the social implications of her action,
     garnered as much newspaper space in the 1920s as the question of long hair on men
     received some forty years later, and for similar reasons. Well-meaning people were
     affronted by what they considered to be a frightening challenge to the conventions
     of the masculine-feminine polarity. They responded with an anger that they themselves
     poorly understood, and they covered their confusion with ringing laughter and pious
     sentiments over decency, dignity and moral codes.
    Five years after Gilman’s lecture the issue of bobbed hair could no longer be treated
     as a joke. Chicago’s largest department store, Marshall Field, publicly dismissed
     a salesgirl, Miss Helen Armstrong, on the grounds that her bob was “not dignified.”
     Other Marshall Field employees who dared to cut were told to report to work in hairnets
     until their bobs grew out. The liberal conscience was finally pricked. That repository
     of socialconcern The Nation rose to the defense of short-haired women in a stirring editorial. Marshall Field,
     the magazine charged, “was guilty of an unwarrantable infringement of personal liberty.” The New York Times weighed the issue on its editorial page and conceded that “Some women find that bobbed
     hair is convenient and sensible.”
    As late as 1927 the women’s magazines were still doing features on both sides of the
     hair-length question. Opera diva Mary Garden was called upon to tell the world why
     she made the decision to cut—“I consider getting rid of our long hair one of the many
     little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom,” she wrote
     with conviction—and America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, defended her waist-length
     curls by pleading that if she took up the shears, her mother, her husband, her maid
     and, above all, her fans would never forgive her. “Can you imagine a fairy princess
     with short, bobbed locks?” asked the silver screen’s own princess. “It is unthinkable
     and almost shocking.”
    She was right. Who can imagine a fairy princess with hair that is anything but long
     and blonde, with eyes that are anything but blue, in clothes that are anything but
     a filmy drape of gossamer and gauze? The fairy princess remains one of the most powerful
     symbols of femininity the Western world has ever devised, and falling short of her
     role model, women are all feminine failures to some degree.
    A shrewd businesswoman who was one of the founders of United Artists, Pickford hesitated
     to tamper with her personal trademark. She was the Girl with the Curl, and her fans
     wrote letters pleading with her not to cut her hair. “I haven’t the courage to fly
     in the face of their disapproval, nor have I the wish,” she admitted. “For their love
     and affection and loyalty I owe them everything, and if curls are the price I shall
     pay it.” According to her biography the price was steep. When she was shooting a movie,
     it took Mary Pickford three hours each morning to wash, set and dry her naturally
     straight hair on rags and rollers. In humid weather she needed another hour in midday,
     while shooting came to a halt, to revive the drooping curls. But big, fat, sausage-shaped
     ringlets were a fantasy about what little girlsshould look like, and Mary Pickford was thirty-six years old at the time she made
     her public promise not to cut her golden curls. One year later, however, she did