Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
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Núra is quick lime, or a composition made of it with arsenic, for taking out hairs by the roots.” Atkinson’s translation also included Kulsūm’s report that it was improper for a young girl to use the depilatory, or for a woman to apply it with her own hands, so that “[w]hen women wish to use the núra, they must request a female friend to rub it on.”65 Other writers similarly highlighted the languorous depilation practiced in the Oriental bath. Richard Burton’s annotated translation of Arabian Nights similarly lingered over the use of depilatories, as did Edward Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and Alexander Russell’s Natural History of Aleppo.66 An essay in the London literary journal The Casket featured an account of a “depilatory pomatum” languidly applied to the body; the visitor to the bath was then carefully washed and scrubbed, wrapped in hot linen, and conducted through winding hallways back out of the inner chambers.67 Andrew Ure described a similar “oriental rusma” in his industrial dictionary, stressing that the pomade “yields to nothing in depilatory power”68 (figure 2.3).
It is difficult to ascertain how influential these depictions may have been in shifting habits in the United States. Certainly no evidence indicates that recurrent references to “Oriental” depilatories led women to remove hair from previously undepilated areas of the body. Yet many if not most commercial depilatory powders and creams, like Gouraud’s, alluded to the “Eastern” or “Oriental” origins of their products. These marketing descriptions, along with travelers’ and journalists’ sensual descriptions of núra and rusma, proliferated just as the production of depilatories was being relocated from home to factory. In fact, such imaginations of the Orient—seductive, mysterious, and potentially dangerous—gained force as economic activity (like meat production) came increasingly under the practical strictures of factory time. To readers confronting the repetitive piecework and tedious clock time required by industrial manufacturing, images of indulgent Turkish baths filled with unguents probably shimmered with temptation. In their allusions to the mysteries of the Orient, advertisers hinted at access to “spiritual or vital qualities as yet uncontaminated by ‘modern’ Western thoughts, processes, and values.”69 So, too, the timeless quality of depictions of Eastern baths may have allowed consumers anxious about packaged compounds to believe that they were made from ancient, well-tested wisdom rather than novel, potentially harmful industrial chemicals. The popularity of references to “Oriental” hair removers in the antebellum period, just as the production of such bodily goods was being relocated from home to factory, suggests this kind of symbolic mediation. Discussions of núra and rusma helped affix an exotic, preindustrial aura to new manufactured goods.70
Figure 2.3. The Turkish Bath by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1862), suggesting Western fascination with “Oriental” depilatory practices. (Courtesy Musée du Louvre.)
Indeed, some critics worried that advertisers’ mystified images of the Orient were acting to obscure awareness of the potentially injurious effects of depilatory chemicals. The Workingman’s Advocate complained as much in 1830: “[U]nsuspecting delicate females” find themselves “lulled into the belief that these [arsenic and pearl-white depilatories] are harmless, because they are graced by pretty names, Oriental, Itilian [sic], or French.” But in truth, such “chemicals of the toilette . . . very materially assist the messenger of death. There is scarce a cosmetic that is not a deleterious and destructive poison.”71 Another strong critique of commercial preparations concluded that women would be better off consulting recipe manuals and making their own toiletries, which would “certainly be more safe, and we believe far more beneficial than the patent nostrums.”72 Likewise, the 1834 Toilette of Health, Beauty, and Fashion recommended homemade compounds of parsley water, acacia juice, and gum of ivy, or milk thistle mixed with oil.73 Andrew Ure recommended tempering the “causticity” of store-bought hair-removing pomades by adding a bit of “starch or rye flour” from the kitchen.74
Such advice points to an ambivalent process of accommodation, as Americans shifted from using familiar, handcrafted preparations to purchasing commodities produced at a distance. Ambivalence is understandable, as the market revolution at once expanded the array of available off-the-shelf goods and rendered purchasers newly vulnerable to obscure and unregulated processes of production. While the shift from homemade depilatories to those concocted at remote perfumeries was surely one of the more modest features of the nation’s turbulent transition from agrarianism to industrial manufacturing, it did require an uncommonly visceral absorption of that larger sea change: applying the products of industry directly to one’s face. In this sense, the seeming banality of hair removal helped veiled the significance of the transformation: women’s active incorporation of an emerging economic system. Like other elements of daily life, care of the body was entwined in a strange new industrial order.75
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BEARDED WOMEN AND DOG-FACED MEN
Darwin’s Great Denudation
EVEN AS INDUSTRIAL and geopolitical change brought heightened attention to packaged depilatory powders, disdain for visible body hair remained relatively contained through the first half of the nineteenth century, an attitude considered specific to American “Indians.” Other than the men of science busily establishing racial differences in hair growth, the perfumers and druggists pushing treatments for low foreheads or side whiskers, and sideshow barkers seeking to profit from the exhibition of spectacularly hairy individuals, few Americans at midcentury appear to have given much thought to body hair.
After 1871, however, attitudes began to shift. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, perspectives on the relations between “man” and “brute” received a startling jolt.1 Darwinian frameworks and vocabularies, spread by scientific and medical experts and by the popular press, came to exercise enormous influence on American ideas about hair, fur, wool, and the differences—such as they were—between them. After Descent, dwindling numbers of Americans would attribute visible differences in body hair to divine design or to the relative balance of bile, blood, and phlegm. Instead, differences in hair type and amount came to be described as effects of evolutionary forces: the tangible result of competitive selection. Moreover, the same traditions of comparative anatomy that helped to launch evolutionary theory provoked ongoing interest in the scientific analysis of body hair. Although these diverse experts never spoke with one voice on the significance of body hair, collectively they succeeded in pathologizing “excessive” hair growth. By the dawn of the twentieth century, hairiness had been established as a sign of sexual, mental, and criminal deviance.
ALTHOUGH DARWIN HINTED in his 1859 introduction to the Origin of Species that the book would shed light on the contentious subject of “man and his origins,” not until 1871’s Descent of Man did he seek to explain both how man was “descended from some pre-existing form” and how apparent variations in physical characteristics came to be: why some bodies are darker or furrier or smaller than others, and so on.2
Body hair played a pivotal (and underappreciated) role in both explanations. The evolutionary ideas often said to have been “discovered” by Darwin were actually pieced together from many sources; chief among those sources were earlier comparative studies of hair.3 Among the many details from his encyclopedic notes that Darwin included in Descent are accounts of the eradication of eyebrows in South America and Africa; of the monetary value (twenty shillings) accorded to the loss of a beard in Anglo-Saxon law; and of the Fuegian Islanders’ threat to a particular young missionary (“far from a hairy man”) that they would “strip him naked, and pluck the hairs from his face and body.”4 Darwin took many of these examples from two American sources: Catlin’s two-volume 1841 ethnography of the manners and customs of North American Indians and Gould’s massive 1869 survey of Civil War soldiers.5
If Darwin wished merely to describe the influence