Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair Read Online Free PDF Page A

and sociability. The common English phrase “clean-shaven” neatly sums up these associations. A shorn man was neat, energetic, and dependable. Because society valued these virtues, men were eager to prove themselves with their razors.

12
HAIR ON THE LEFT
    The strong association of cleanly shaved faces with conformity in the early twentieth century made it almost inevitable that critics of the status quo would again choose facial hair as a sign of protest. A spirit of restless independence, along with a few furry chins, emerged among beatniks soon after World War II. In the late 1960s, these iconoclasts were joined by thousands more, and the growth of hair paralleled the radicalization of the baby-boom generation. In the 1970s, a reaction against both radicalism and hair gained strength, leaving a mixed legacy for our times.

13
POSTMODERN MEN
    In the twenty-first century, facial hair has attained greater social presence than in the previous century, but not to the extent that we can call it a new beard movement. The shaved face remains the established norm for sociable manliness. A bearded man must still face the slings and arrows of disapproval and distrust. Men still do not enjoy a fundamental right to wear facial hair, as civil and private institutions continue to enforce grooming codes. The primary statement a man makes with a beard, therefore, is that he autonomous, free to do as he pleases. Artists, musicians, and professors favor beards for this reason.
    There are, of course, exceptions. For members of traditionalist religious groups, facial hair makes a statement about collective autonomy from mainstream society, not individual liberty within the group. And some men have more specific goals than the exercise of personal freedom. Culturally speaking, there are today four basic motives for growing beards besides personal autonomy: gender bending, social nonconformity, religious identification, and a special quest. These objectives often overlap in various ways. Men, for example, who are attempting to redefine gender, or to identify with a religious minority, are in many respects nonconformists.
    The variety and uses of beards in the new millennium tells us a great deal about what men are thinking and how they are taking advantage of their hair to shape new understandings of manliness in a fluid and pluralistworld. One recent formulation of masculine identity, for example, is the “metrosexual,” a gender-bending type who finds self-expression in a carefully styled appearance.

CONCLUSIONS
    One intent of this work has been simply to marvel at the extraordinary lives of men and women in history. The personalities considered here are a diverse bunch, to be sure. Another aspiration has been to shed light on dark corners of our understanding, dispelling common misperceptions about facial hair and its history. The most significant myth to be set aside is the notion that changes in facial hair are the meaningless product of fashion cycles. Beard lore is full of bogus explanations for changes in style that have distracted us from a far more interesting reality. Alexander did not order his men to shave simply to prevent beard pulling; he inviting them to see themselves as extraordinary and heroic. Hadrian did not grow a beard to cover a skin problem; instead, he was attempting to redefine masculine and imperial authority in terms of philosophic reasoning. King Francis I of France did not grow hair on his cheeks because his face was injured by a snowball; he was, rather, expressing Renaissance pride in humanity. Beards did not become popular in the nineteenth century because of the Crimean War or the American Civil War, nor did they disappear in the twentieth century because of Gillette’s safety razor. These great shifts marked, rather, varying strategies to assert appropriate and compelling forms of manhood in the altered political, economic, and family patterns of industrial society. To explain the prevalence of the