New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair Framing the Face

This volume brings together a range of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to re-examine the histories of facial hair and its place in discussions of gender, the military, travel and art, amongst others. Chapters in the first section of the collection explore the intricate history of beard wearing and shaving, including facial hair fashions in long historical perspective, and the depiction of beards in portraiture. Section Two explores the shifting meanings of the moustache, both as a manly symbol in the nineteenth century, and also as the focus of the material culture of personal grooming. The final section of the collection charts the often-complex relationship between men, women and facial hair. It explores how women used facial hair to appropriate masculine identity, and how women’s own hair was read as a sign of excessive and illicit sexuality.

Introduction; Jennifer Evans and Alun Withey.- Part I: (Re)Building the Beard?.- 2. Social Science, Gender Theory and the History of Hair; Christopher Oldstone-Moore.- 3.“The head and front of my offending”: beards, portraiture, and self-presentation in early modern England; Margaret Pelling.- 4.Hair, Beards and the Fashioning of English Manhood in Early Modern Travel Texts; Eleanor Rycroft.- 5.Beardless Young Men? Some Notes on the Construction of Masculinities through Facial Hair in Nineteenth-Century Spain; M. Victoria Alonso Cabezas.- 6.Facial hair and historical memory in 1960s and 1970s Britain; Mark Anderson.- 7. A Tiny Cloak of Privilege: Facial Hair and Story Telling; Helen Casey.- Part II: Masculinity and the Moustache.- 8.Combing Masculine Identity in the Age of the Moustache, 1870-1900; Sharon Twickler.- 9.Whiskers at War: Moustaches, Modernity, Militarism and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century British Army; Alice White.- Part III: Feminine Facial Hair and Feminine Responses to Facial Hair.- 10.“Clap on these False Beards”: Female Playwrights and their Beards; Morwenna Carr.- 11. Feminine Facial Hair in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century France; Aurore Chéry.-  Index