A woman's hair is more than just something that covers her head.
Little girls learn this very early. At least that's how I learned it. I watched my mother dye her gray hair at the bathroom sink, pom-pom her short hair, hide her hair under a hat. I would get upset when she combed my matted hair and wove my hair into French braids.
Hair seemed to have some secret power – that it did more than just make someone more attractive or beautiful.
Art historian Elizabeth L. Block has also noticed this. Her new book, “Beyond vanity: the history and power of hairdressing” (MIT Press, published Tuesday), highlights the importance of hair in women’s lives — emotionally, economically, socially and politically.
Block is a senior editor in the publications and editorial department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has spent the past 15 years studying portraits of 19th-century women by American painters such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.
But while historians have long analysed the clothing depicted in these paintings, they have largely ignored the hairstyles.
“Hair always comes last,” Block told the Post. “And I don’t understand why that is, because women spend so much time on it!”
“Beyond Vanity” focuses on hair practices in America from 1865 to 1900, a time of rapid growth, industrialization, the construction of railroads and increasing independence — which brought enormous changes for women and their men.
“I read a lot of women’s magazines and letters [from the era]And yes, they're talking about clothes, they're talking about raising children, but they're talking Very About the hair,” Block said.
“Beyond Vanity” shows that hair has huge consequences. Wearing your hair loose in public could get you ostracized from society, but good hair could get you a husband or a job. Black women were regularly punished for their hair; former slave Louisa Pickett's voluminous hair was cut off after it aroused the jealousy of the owner's white daughter.
“Women definitely know the value of their hair,” Block said.
So women burned their split ends with candles and applied egg yolk to their hair. They also spent hours drying their hair in the sun (as was recommended).
Women and girls of all classes and races—even in slave quarters—braided and styled each other's hair. Some enslaved women wore brightly colored headwraps to preserve their identity and dignity in the face of such inhumane treatment.
Eileen Travel
After the Civil War, several changes boosted the hair industry, Block said: the construction of the railroads (which made the world “a little smaller”), the unprecedented wealth brought by industrialization (which allowed the newly wealthy to throw fancy balls), the invention of the bicycle (which gave women unprecedented independence and mobility), and the explosion of color print production.
Pictures of actresses such as Sandra Bernhardt with flaming hair gave birth to the hair trend.
Gilded Age partygoers spent hours fussing over their peculiar hairstyles, which were stage-like and were voraciously covered by the press. (Block mentions a taxidermied kitten headdress that one socialite, the eccentric Kate Fearing Strong, wore to the Vanderbilt ball.) Advertising began to flourish, and “hair rooms,” hairdressers, and hair products flooded the market.
Hair provided women with economic and social mobility. Some opened their own salons or worked independently as dressers. One black entrepreneur, Christina Cartex Bannister, hosted community events and abolitionist gatherings at her hair shop in Boston and Providence, RI, and made enough money to finance her husband's landscape painting career.
Madam C.J. Walker became the first black millionaire with her products made specifically for African-American hair.
And hairstyles also helped blur class and racial lines. Black journalist Ida B. Wells wore the same Gibson Girl updo as her white peers. Shopgirls and socialites adopted similar styles. The “new woman” hastily pinned her hair into a loose bouffant, regardless of status. These new hairstyles made it easier to work and play – whether scrubbing the scalp, riding a bicycle, or swimming at the beach.
“Women were entering more into public life and the workplace,” Block said. “So their hairstyles and clothing needed to reflect the need for more mobility.”
Over the past 125 years, attitudes towards hair have become much more relaxed. Yet hair still has the power to seduce, to frustrate, to provoke, to establish a distinct identity and place in the world.
Global hair care industry It is valued at $91.2 billionBut it goes even deeper. In 2022, women in Iran cut their hair in public to protest the death of the young woman, Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police because her hijab slipped off.
Block pointed out that 24 states in the U.S. have passed the Crown Act, which prohibits schools and workplaces from discriminating based on individuals' hair.
“Hair is a part of all of our lives,” Block said. “It's a common material, but it holds unusual abilities and powers.”
“In many ways this book is about women's history,” she said. “It's about women's lives and it's a love letter to hairdressers.”
