In the closing months of 2006, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) traveled to the internment facility at Guantánamo Bay run by the U.S. Department of Defense. There, the representatives conducted private interviews with fourteen “high value” detainees held in custody by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in accordance with the ICRC’s legal obligation to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions. Their resulting forty-page report on detainee treatment, sent to the acting general counsel of the CIA in February 2007, concluded that the “totality of circumstances” in which the detainees were held “amounted to an...

Americans tend to remember Thomas Jefferson for many things, but his thoughts about hair removal are not generally among them. Nevertheless, Jefferson expressed a studied opinion on the matter in his only book,Notes on the State of Virginia(1785). He turned to hair in a long passage enumerating the distinctions he detected between “the Indians” and “whites”:

It has been said that the Indians have less hair than the whites, except on the head. But this is a fact of which fair proof can scarcely be had. With them it is disgraceful to be hairy on the body. They...

Although travelers and naturalists’ fascination with Indian plucking and shaving would seem to indicate that whites themselves possessed no analogous habits, the prevalence of recipes for homemade hair removers in eighteenth-century domestic manuals and etiquette guides suggests that some of their contemporaries, at least, were seasoned hands at hair removal. Steeped in the same humoral theories of health that informed the work of Linnaeus, Buffon, and other prominent natural philosophers, ordinary colonial women viewed facial complexion as a reflection of underlying temperament and spirit. An “unblemished” face was a primary standard of physical beauty in the eighteenth century, an achievement...

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...

The fascination with body hair fertilized by theories of sexual selection blossomed in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Women’s body hair, in particular, attracted fervent attention. Physician after physician described the severe depression, self-imposed seclusion, and nausea common to women “afflicted” with heavy hair growth—particularly hair on the face. In 1913, one recalled a typical patient who “gave up a very lucrative position, shunned all her acquaintances, refused to go out unless heavily veiled, and slowly drifted into true melancholia” due to her hairiness.¹ “Subjects of this growth are notably sensitive and depressed,” said another in the...

In 1946, the Science News Letter, an American publication designed to convey breaking discoveries to the wider public, reported a novel transplant operation involving a young woman “of the bearded lady type.” According to the two physicians who treated her, “overactive adrenal glands” had given the young woman an abundance of facial hair, and the woman had become “depressed” over her appearance. The two physicians persuaded the distraught patient to have her adrenal gland surgically removed, in order to slow the hair growth.

The extracted gland was then transplanted to a young woman with Addison’s disease, a chronic adrenal condition...

In the summer of 1972, as the United States sat mired in a deepening war in Vietnam and facing an acrimonious presidential election, the editors ofMs. magazine prepared their first regular issue for distribution. The issue included essays on the value of house-work, lesbian love and sexuality, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Joining such concerns to the forthcoming national elections, the cover displayed the cartoon figure of a strident Wonder Woman alongside the caption “Peace and Justice in ’72” (figure 6.1).

But it was not merely the magazine’s pursuit of peace and justice that resonated with readers, nor its...

Residual debate over the political meanings of hairy armpits or shins was largely swept to the side with the rise of so-called Brazilian waxing in the early 2000s. A “Brazilian” entails removing all or nearly all hair from the genital area, including the vulva, anus, and perineum (figure 7.1). Adoption of the practice soared after Carrie Bradshaw, the main character of the popular HBO television series,Sex and the City, described the procedure in a 2000 episode.¹ Within a decade, some estimates suggested that one in five American women under the age of twenty-five were maintaining consistent, complete removal of...

The prevalence of waxing in the early twenty-first century, a method of hair removal with antecedents in the ancient world, highlights a curious fact about Americans’ increasingly dogged pursuit of hairless skin: despite decades of experimentation with a staggering array of tools, depilation has remained stubbornly resistant to mechanization. Extracting vast numbers of tiny, embedded objects from the variable surface of the living body continues to present a daunting technical challenge. The arrival of hair removing lasers in the closing years of the twentieth century thus seemed to auger a welcome technological revolution: a way to abolish the time-consuming, skill-intensive,...

In 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and a company called Celera Genomics began a formal collaboration to determine the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs comprising human DNA and to identify its roughly twenty-five thousand genes, or functional segments. Committed from the outset to transferring the knowledge and tools it developed to private sector companies, the collaboration, officially known as the Human Genome Project, kindled the rapid growth of commercial biotechnology in the United States: according to some reports, related revenues from publicly traded U.S. companies rose from just over $8 billion...

Americans are not born averse to body hair. Nor is any particular group responsible for all the plucking, waxing, shaving, and lasering evident today. Rather than demonstrating the innate appeal of fur-free skin or a conspiracy designed to infantilize women, the rise of hair removal over the last century could be said to reflect broader sea changes in American social and economic life: the convergence of shifting gender roles, immigration patterns, labor practices, manufacturing processes, domestic arrangements, media flows, racial prejudices, military endeavors, scientific discoveries, and commercial innovations. Over time, hairlessness, once perceived as a characteristic “deficiency” of the continent’s...