At the outset of the United States, leg and underarm hair removal was not a common
practice for women. In fact, body hair had been viewed as a boon by Caucasian people,
and therefore removal was not an imported practice from European settlers into the United States.
The removal of armpit and leg hair by American women became a new practice
in the early 20th century due to a confluence of multiple factors.
One cultural change was the definition of femininity. In the Victorian era, it was based
on moral character. This shifted in the early 1920s when the new feminine idea became based
on the body. Women revealed more of their bodies in 1920s clothing; and at the same time they began
using bras, makeup, and dieting. Author of The Body Project, J. Brumberg, summarizes, "The body
itself became the fashion in the 1920s." In this context, hair removal was promoted as a gender
norm requirement for women, to be attained through consumption and use of hair removal products.
Underarm hair history Developments in three industries enabled a
heavy and effective advertising campaign beginning in 1908 to show American people that female
underarm hair was offensive. These industries were the male hair removal products industry,
which had become recently commercially successful and sought to expand its market;
the women's clothing fashion industry, which began producing sheer and sleeveless evening
gowns and rising hemlines; and the mass production of women's magazines.
The market for female hair removal products Men had already been shaving at barber's
shops and later at home when a men's disposable "safety-razor" was introduced for home use in
1903. Quickly successful, Gillette sold 90,000 razor sets the next year. A female market for
hair removal products, on the other hand, did not yet exist in the United States; that market had to
be created. According to Hansen, a researcher on the topic, "The practice of removing hair from the
underarms and legs was practically unheard of." She goes on, "In fact, hair removal was such a
novel concept when it was first introduced that companies had to persuade women of the benefits
of hair removal, and demonstrate how to practice it." The first razor marketed specifically to
women came to market in 1915 from Gillette. From then to the 1930s, Gillette and dozens
of other hair removal companies used the changes in women's clothing fashions as justification for
the sudden need to remove underarm hair, and later leg hair. The message was distributed
primarily and heavily through the newly born, popular and influential women's magazines.
Rise of women's magazines The Delineator,
first published in 1873, was the first women's magazine. Five others appeared soon after,
comprising what became known as the "Big Six": Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion,
Good Housekeeping, McCall's, and Pictorial Review. The publisher of the Ladies Home Journal,
Cyrus Curtis, told advertisers that the purpose of the magazine was to give manufacturers a way
to market their products to women, not for the benefit of American women. The goal of
advertisers was to not only fulfill women's needs; it was to create new ones. The amount of
advertising for toiletries and beauty services were second only to advertisements for food.
Estimated advertising spending between 1890 and 1914 grew from $190 million to $682 million.
Improvements in printing technologies, railroad transportation and postal
services made mass circulation of these magazines possible. The population of
women increased by two thirds between 1890 and 1920 and the literacy rate jumped to 94%
in 1920. Both of these demographic shifts increased the audience for women's magazines.
The most popular women's magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, had 25,000 readers by the end of its
first year. The reach of these women's magazines meant they were extraordinarily influential.
The Great Underarm Campaign Advertisements suggesting
that women remove hair under the arm, and explaining how and why to do so,
were published as early as 1908, and ran more steadily beginning in 1914.
The 1915 advertisement on the right ran in Harper's Bazaar for a depilatory powder called
X Bazin is stereotypical of ads during this time in that it defines why underarm hair removal is
necessary. It also shows an image of a woman in a sleeveless gown with her arm up and the caption
"Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair."
Advertisers were careful to use wording they felt would be more palatable to their audience,
for example "smoothing" instead of "shaving" and "limbs" instead of "legs".
The educational campaign on the benefits of and methods of hair removal persisted into the ads of
the early 1920s and even continue today. Underarm hair in these ads was called "objectionable",
"unwelcome", "embarrassing", "unsightly" and "unclean"; and its removal indicated
a person who had "charm" and "the last touch of ‘feminine loveliness'" and was "modest",
"dainty and perfectly groomed"; the practice was for "refined women" and "women of fashion."
Hair removal product manufacturers initially focused their marketing on the upper class.
Beginning in 1934, a similar type of advertising showed up in the middle-class Ladies' Home
Journal that had been running in upper class Harper's Bazaar for the past 15 years.
Leg hair history The 1920s extended the hairless
ideal of the armpits to the legs as well. Hemlines rose on skirts and dresses from 1910 to 1927.
Americans wore thick dark-colored stockings at first, which were taken over during this
period by flesh-colored stockings to simulate the look of bare legs, without actually being bare.
Then ads alluding to leg hair removal began. While ads between 1920 and 1940 do refer to legs,
legs were not the focus in 90% of those ads. The first ad in Harper's Bazaar that focused
primarily on the legs appeared in 1929. The ad campaign against leg hair was not as voluminous
as the campaign against underarm hair had been. However, writers for beauty magazines and books
did reinforce the hairless-leg message. This had not happened in the Underarm Campaign.
Leg hair removal gained popularity after one historical event. Hosiery production
plummeted suddenly in 1941 by 97% when the US War Production Board curtailed silk and nylon
stockings manufacturing. In response, American ladies applied decals or "liquid stockings" to
simulate the seam of stockings, atop of shaved legs. Between 1942 and 1945, the War Production
Board imposed further limits on cosmetic manufacturing, including leg makeup, taxing
cosmetics as much as 20%. The norm to remove leg hair for women became very strong in the 1940s,
more specifically, it moved from fad to custom in a matter of months in the early 1940s. A later
survey, in 1964, indicated that 98% of American women aged 15–44 routinely shaved their legs.
Modern practices A century after these ad campaigns started,
removal of leg and underarm hair by women in the U.S. is tremendously pervasive and
lack of its removal is taboo in some circles. An estimated 80–99% of American women today remove
hair from their bodies. Celebrity unshaven armpit appearances started to make headlines.
For example, this was the case with actress Julia Roberts who sported unshaven underarms
at the Notting Hill movie premiere in 1999. Anne Robinson, a presenter of the British television
show The Weakest Link, received a similar reaction after she revealed underarm hair on air in 2008.
Dated studies have found that some people—namely, men—perceive women who do not remove body hair
to be less sexually attractive, sociable and intelligent than the same woman without body hair,
and have speculated that it may incite disgust among some men.
However, women—especially those within the gen z consortium—are
beginning to return to the idea that a natural body is beautiful, and are shunning the idea that
they must adhere to taxing hair removal routines normalized merely to sell beauty products.