When American women reach for that familiar pink razor, they probably don’t think about why they are doing it. Eliminating unwanted body hair has become to many women a ritual required to fulfill their hygiene regimen. Smooth legs, underarms, and the absence of any other socially atrocious body hair is the norm for American women, and keeping your fur could make you undesirable, unkempt, or unfeminine by our present cultural standards.

Body hair removal is not historically unique to American women. Women in Ancient Eygpt, Rome, and Greece removed all hair from their bodies except from their head and eyebrows, because it was deemed uncivilized. Paintings from Ancient Greece often depict female deities with the absence of pubic hair.
But American women didn’t always chain themselves to the razor—at the turn of the twentieth century the practice of shaving leg and underarm hair was virtually nonexistent. After all, the fashion of the time didn’t require women to expose their figures; skirts typically reached the ankles, and sleeves covered the underarm area.

So how is it that in a period of one-hundred years American women went from shaving no part of their bodies to shaving most of it as an integral part of hygiene? A number of factors are responsible for our present obsession, stemming from the changing fashions, advertisements, marketing, and economic conditions of the last century.

In 1915 Gillette marketed the first razor for women, coinciding with the shorter hemlines of women’s dresses. Rayon stockings also became popular because they were affordable to women of all social classes and simulated the look of bare and hairless legs and encouraged women to shave.

World War II rationing also played a part in supporting leg shaving. Skirts were kept short to conserve fabric, and nylon was rationed for parachutes and other wartime materials. Stockings were hard to come by. Leg makeup compensated for the absence of nylon, but it required shaved legs to create a smooth, stocking-like surface.

Beyond shaving as a means of supporting war rations, maintaining feminine glamour was stressed by advertisers as a response to the changing roles of women in the workforce. Women challenged society’s image of traditional femininity by taking on highly physical jobs in factories to support the war effort. They were no longer tied to the home and were capable of building airplanes, tanks, and performing hard manual labor. Cosmetics companies capitalized on this, emphasizing that women should remain feminine. Tangee Cosmetics ran ads that proclaimed lipstick maintained femininity—“even though you are doing man’s work.”

Those same lipstick ads claimed that makeup application was an act of patriotism. One advertisement pictured a woman factory worker applying lipstick with the slogan, “are you doing your part—and more?”
Early feminists of the 1960s famously protested the image of the hairless woman by displaying their own grown-out body hair in an effort to empower women to create a new standard of womanhood. Feminist scholars argue that hair removal by women is an effort to return to a pre-pubescent state, as preadolescent girls have smooth legs and no pubic hair.

As an activity, shaving for women is greatly different from the association men have with shaving. As Wendy Chapkis states in the book Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance, shaving for a man is an openly displayed activity that reinforces manhood, whereas for women shaving is a secret act only indicated by the results. As with makeup, Chapkis states that “even more public acts of femininity, like applying make-up, tend to rely on an underlying message of female inadequacy. There is a problem to be corrected, a basic improvement to be made.”

Shaving companies have been aware of women’s feelings of inadequacy for a long time. One market research study done by Gillette in the 1980s found that “When men cut themselves, they blamed the razor—when women got a nick or cut, they blamed themselves.”

Despite efforts of feminists to reverse the American cultural ideology of the hairless woman, shaving is still the norm. Once girls enter puberty, shaving becomes a rite of passage, like getting your period. The continued practice of shaving is no accident—girls and women are confronted daily with pictures of hairless women in the media, and sales of shaving products are evidence of the effectiveness of those images. In 2002 Gillette made $3.4 billion in razor and blade sales, a seven percent increase from the previous year.

Whether it has been fashion trends, limited resources, or the influence of the media, the pressure for women to eliminate body hair has come from a variety of sources. Here, in the twenty-first century, perhaps ladies should reexamine their behavior and ask themselves their reasons for picking up a razor. Are you doing it because you want to, or because you think you should?