BEARDS

The beard's absence or presence is fundamental to the male appearance, a prominent feature of the most visible part of the body—the face. Since deliberate action is required to remove this natural growth, a decision is necessary about whether to shave or not. Thus, all men must choose on this matter of taste, even if only to ignore its growth. This makes the beard most significant in the evolution of male visual identity. But its aesthetic impact should be viewed in conjunction with the other elements of the male image, such as dress, hairstyles, jewelry, footwear, and other personal accessories. The whole thus forms an aggregate of evolving designs, an interweaving of elements that constitutes the cultural history of male visual identity.

Beards have long been associated with maturity, masculinity, strength, wisdom, and virility. In ancient Egypt, the beard was so important as a royal symbol of authority that women ascending the throne were depicted wearing false beards made of spun gold. In the Middle Ages, to cut off a man's beard was often considered a worse offense than wounding him. But throughout their history, writers have vehemently defended or attacked beards as being either essential to—or destructive of—physical and mental health and even morality and decency.

Beards declined in fashion in Europe from the mid-seventeenth century. By 1789 smooth shaving was the norm among European elites, fashionable gentlemen, and commoners as well, especially in western and southern Europe. The daily trip to the barbershop—a center for conversation—was considered as much a social visit as a grooming obligation, though many aristocrats were shaved by servants. At the turn of the eighteenth century, to help westernize the appearance of his people, the Russian tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) even discouraged beards by ordering that they be taxed. But some men did wear beards, including Jews, southeastern European Muslims, a few artists (including English poet William Blake [1757–1827]), eccentrics, hermits, eastern and northern European peasants, and peasants elsewhere too, especially in remote mountainous or forested regions. Beards were then worn in armies (usually by regulation) almost exclusively by ax-wielding "pioneers," who preceded armies to clear away thick underbrush, an image evoking the woodsman.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, researchers who sought to understand the differences between the various human races asserted that the thickness of beard growth differentiated "superior" and "inferior" races. White Europeans' beards indicated their superiority, while less heavily bearded Africans, East Asians, and Native Americans were deemed inferior, although heavy-bearded Arabs and Turks were apparently ignored. Some medical writers linked beards to virility, asserting that male facial hair (and sweat) was semen that had been reabsorbed by the body.

Beards first revived in the late 1790s among nonconformist French artists called the "Barbus" (bearded ones), and some fancy Continental cavalry officers soon followed this trend with small, neatly trimmed beards. But beards only significantly increased in popularity around 1840, a reaction in part against the artificiality of the clean-shaven, self-indulgent, decadent, and arrogantly self-important image of the elitist "dandy" fashion look. The middle classes had gained substantially in economic power, due to the Industrial Revolution and expanded trade. Thus a more respectable outward appearance became socially required, as cities grew and business was thus increasingly conducted between strangers—an absolutely fundamental shift from the past. So the importance of a respectable public image became all-important. Because Christianity was then intrinsic to an appearance of respectability, beards gained in popularity in part because they were associated with the bearded Biblical patriarchs, and it was not uncommon for men by the 1840s and later to wear them without moustaches.

But in the long-term ebb and flow of fashion, the younger generation of this early Victorian era increasingly felt that a new look had become appropriate and desirable, symbolically rejecting the older generation's visual identity, with this emblem of their own. As usual, this was at first condemned, often for being "revolutionary"—an association that continues to the present—by those who felt disturbed by this deviation from the status quo. The "imperial," a small, stylish, pointed goatee-like beard, was popularized by French Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1851–1870), but more men wore the plainer, full beard, and its greatest popularity occurred from the 1860s to the early 1890s.

Afterward, the beard declined and became increasingly associated with older men, especially those viewed as being out of step with the changing times. Razors for self-shaving had appeared by the mid-nineteenth century, and more men shaved themselves, but as with other aspects of fashion, "the look" was what really mattered, and the usual arguments about convenience, health, and so on, were primarily rationalizations to legitimize taste. By 1914 the beard was again largely unfashionable.

See alsoBody; Bourgeoisie; Class and Social Relations; Clothing, Dress, and Fashion.

bibliography

Cooper, Wendy. Hair: Sex, Society, Symbolism. New York, 1971.

Corson, Richard. Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years. New York, 1965.

Leach, E. R. "Magical Hair." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 88 (July–December 1958): 147–164.

Peterkin, Allan. One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair. Vancouver, 2001. Popular illustrated history.

Reynolds, Reginald. Beards: Their Social Standing, Religious Involvements, Decorative Possibilities, and Value in Offence and Defense Through the Ages. Garden City, N.Y., 1949.

Schiebinger, Londa. Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston, 1993. Good brief overview of cultural development of the beard.

Scott Hughes Myerly