Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
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in Britain, the average textile factory employed fewer than one hundred people.29 The increasing popularity of packaged hair removers in the 1810s and 1820s, like the gradual, uneven transfer of cloth production from the household treadle looms to the water-powered factories dotting the rivers of New England, signaled an emerging reliance on manufactured goods—one made possible through the application of new chemical and mechanical arts.
One of the leading products of the age, Atkinson’s depilatory, exemplifies these new goods.30 Developed by an entrepreneur who billed himself as the “perfumer to the [British] Royal Family,” Atkinson’s was a mixture of one part ground orpiment (a common sulfide mineral), six parts quicklime, and a little flour.31 Generally applied to the face and neck, it was designed to remove “superfluous” hair, which advertisements routinely described as the greatest “blemish” a woman might possess. “This great disfigurement of female beauty,” one advertisement in the Liberator explained, “is effectually removed by this article, which is perfectly safe, and easily applied, and certain in its effects” (figure 2.1).32 Although appearing in newspapers with both black and white readers, Atkinson’s advertisements presumed that pale, hairless complexion was desired: one advertisement noted that the product would not merely remove “superfluous Hair” but also leave “the skin soft and whiter than before the application.”33
Atkinson’s was also representative in another way: the manufacturers of packaged depilatories appear to have been mostly men, despite women’s longstanding proficiency with homemade hair removers. This fact is remarkable: more generally, the manufacture of cosmetics in early-nineteenth-century America provided uncommon opportunities for women entrepreneurs, prospects unavailable in more guild-oriented, male-dominated occupations such as hairdressing, wig making, and barbering.34 By the second half of the nineteenth century, some women entrepreneurs were moving to the forefront of American cosmetics production, including Ellen Demorest (born in 1824), Madam C. J. Walker (1867), Helena Rubenstein (1870), and Elizabeth Arden (1884).35 Little evidence suggests, however, that women were similarly involved in the production or marketing of the packaged depilatories circulating in antebellum America.36
The relative paucity of women making and selling packaged depilatories points to the products’ unusual position at the confluence of folk medicine and newly centralized meat production—a domain of industry heavily dominated by men. Throughout the eighteenth century, when city dwellers accounted for only a small fraction of the nation’s population, most Americans reared and slaughtered their own animals. In the first federal census of 1790, there were only twenty-four cities in the country, and only two of those cities had populations exceeding 25,000. By 1840, however, the percentage of Americans living in cities had more than doubled, the number of cities had jumped to 131, and the population of New York City alone exceeded 250,000.37 As settlements expanded and became too crowded for individuals or families to rear their own livestock, centralized stockyards and slaughterhouses grew accordingly, further segregating humans from other domesticated animals.
Figure 2.1. An 1840 advertisement for Atkinson’s depilatory in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.
The expansion of centralized meat production spawned new investment in hair removal. Killing itself was not the tricky part of mass meat production; prior to the advent of mechanized refrigeration, the more complicated issue was distributing the meat as quickly as possible once the animal was dead. Focus thus turned to the problem of securing efficient, uninterrupted dismemberment. A giant moving chain, from which dead pigs were hung, conveyed the highly perishable animal through a “disassembly” line—credited by Henry Ford as an inspiration for his continuous factory production line. As with automobile assembly, the complex work of dismantling a large animal was divided into minute tasks, each performed by a single worker: repetitively chopping, breaking, stripping, packing. To the goal of efficient, uninterrupted disassembly, the task of stripping hair from hides presented a vexing bottleneck.38
Prior to the mechanization of slaughter, individual animal hides were stripped of hair through a gory and laborious manual process. Skins, covered with soil and blood, generally would be scrubbed clean of residual animal flesh. Hair was then softened and loosened by soaking the skin in urine, lime, or salt, and then scraped clean—“scudded”—by hand. To complete the transition from rawhide to imperishable leather, the skin would be pounded and kneaded, often with dung used as an emollient, and then stretched and dried.39 Foul-smelling from the combination of urine, feces, and decomposing flesh, these tanning operations were generally confined to the outskirts of town near moving water where waste could be dumped. With the increase in animal processing made possible by systematic disassembly, industrialists experimented with faster, less labor-intensive techniques of “unhairing” (figure 2.2). Scores of inventors sought new methods for expediting the process of transforming a living animal to its exchangeable and constitutive parts. As with the introduction of overhead conveyer chains in the disassembly process, experimenters sought to substitute nonhuman labor for human manual work.40
Where hair was concerned, many of the most effective labor-saving arts turned out to be chemical, as the influential industrial philosopher Andrew Ure noted in his widely read dictionary of mechanical arts.41 Adapting techniques of hair removal reaching back centuries, inventors scaled up the conversion of hairy living animals into meat, leather, and wool, deepening knowledge of industrial chemistry in the process. Alkalis such as lime (calcium hydroxide) and soda ash (sodium carbonate) were most common, but various combinations of sulfides, cyanides, and amines were also developed to help weaken and strip hair.42 Public waters became a convenient receptacle for chemically pulped hair, with damaging results. The degraded hair released noxious ammonia odors, a stench intensified by the sulfides used in unhairing. Because loose hair and caked lime tended to coat pipes and clog drainages, the effect on waterways was magnified.43 Although toxic, the success of the novel chemical techniques was palpable: by 1830, according to one agricultural journal, the domestic manufacture of hides and skin was worth at least $30 million per year—more than $3.5 million more than total cotton exports from the United States.44
Figure 2.2. Dehiding pigs by scalding. The rise of mass meat production prodded innovation in chemical hair removal. (From Douglas’s Encyclopedia [1902].)
EXISTING SOURCES DO not reveal the precise scope or direction of influence among what might now be considered “cosmetic,” “medical,” and “agricultural” applications of these industrial chemicals. Whether innovations in beautification drove agricultural applications or the other way around remains uncertain. What is clear is that the same technical knowledge that advanced mass animal processing circulated among antebellum toiletry manufacturers: compounds found to help remove hair from hogs might also strip hair from “the human skin,” as Andrew Ure put it, and vice versa.45 One representative technical manual, The Art of Perfumery, proposed that the same chemical depilatory designed for “ladies” who consider hair on the upper lip “detrimental to beauty” would work equally well for “tanners and fellmongers” preparing hides and skins.46
Quite unlike the bovine and porcine hair removal conducted in large, centralized abattoirs, however, human depilatory use was geographically dispersed. Antebellum women’s hair removal remained confined to the isolation of the private home or physician’s office, where the noxious smells of sulfide and ammonia and the mess of pulped hair were generally hidden from the wider public. Visible injuries resulting from the use of caustic depilatories, on the other hand, were not so easily veiled. As a result, concern about changing arts of human hair removal focused not on noxious odors or water contamination but on their more immediate risk to the complexion.47
Numerous commentators worried that solvents “energetic” enough to penetrate