Historian unravels how women’s hair changed American history

A woman’s hair is more than just something that covers her head.

Little girls learn this early. At least I did. I watched my mother dye her gray roots over the bathroom sink, cut her short hair, hiding her frizz under a hat. I suffered as she combed my knotted strands and sat motionless as she French braided my hand.

Hair seemed to hold some kind of secret power—that it did more than just make one more attractive or beautiful.

Art historian Elizabeth L. Block also noticed this. Her fascinating new book, Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing (MIT Press, published Tuesday), unpacks the importance of hair in women’s lives—emotionally, economically, socially and politically.

Block is senior editor of the publications and editorial department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has spent the past 15 years studying 19th-century portraits of women by American painters such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.

But while historians have long analyzed the clothing depicted in these paintings, they have largely ignored the costumes.

“Hair is always cutting edge,” Block told The Post. “And I just couldn’t understand why, because women spend so much time on it!”

“Beyond Vanity” focuses on hair practices in the U.S. from 1865 to 1900, a time of rapid growth, industrialization, railroad construction, and growing freedoms—which brought big changes for women and their manes.

“I read a lot of women’s magazines and papers [from the era]and sure, they’re talking about clothes, they’re talking about raising children, but they’re talking LOT about the hair,” Block said.

“Beyond Vanity” shows that hair had big consequences. Letting your hair down in public can alienate you from society, but a good head of hair can get you a husband or a job. Black women were routinely punished for their hair; ex-slave Louisa Picquet cut off her lustrous hair when it provoked the jealousy of her master’s white daughter.

“Women definitely knew the value of their hair,” Block said.

So the ladies singed their split tops with candles and smeared egg yolks on their mushrooms. They spent hours drying their hair in the sun (as recommended).

Women and girls of all classes and races—including in the slave quarters—braided and combed each other’s manes. Some enslaved women wore brightly colored wraps to assert their identity and dignity in the face of such dehumanization.

After the Civil War, several changes powered the hair industry, Block said: the construction of railroads (which made the world “a little smaller”), unprecedented wealth industrialization brought (which prompted young people to throw beautiful balls), the invention of the bicycle (which gave women unprecedented freedom and mobility), and the explosion of color printmaking.

Photos of actresses such as Sandra Bernhardt with flame hair sparked hair trends.

Partygoers of the Gilded Age spent hours worrying about their wacky prom hairstyles, which were staged and surprisingly covered by the press. (The block mentioned a taxidermied kitten headpiece that a socialite, the eccentric Kate Fearing Strong, wore to a Vanderbilt ball.) Advertising flourished, and “hair salons,” hairdressers, and hair products proliferated.

Hair gave women economic and social mobility. Some opened their own salons or worked as independent dressers. A black entrepreneur, Christina Carteaux Bannister, organized community events and abolitionist rallies at her hair salons in Boston and Providence, RI, and earned enough money to finance her husband’s career in landscape painting.

Ms. C, J. Walker became the first black millionaire with her products made specifically for textured African American hair.

And hairstyles also helped to blur class and racial lines. Black journalist Ida B Wells had the same Gibson Girl style as her white peers. Shop girls and socialites wore identical styles. The “young woman” hastily tied her hair into a loose headscarf, regardless of status. These new suits made work and play easier – whether brushing your hair, riding a bike or swimming at the beach.

“Women were entering public life more and entering the workplace,” Block said. “So their hairstyles and clothing had to reflect the need for increased movement.”

Attitudes towards hair have relaxed greatly in the last 125 years. However, hair still has the power to deceive, to frustrate, to provoke, to assert one’s individuality and place in the world.

The global hair care industry is valued at $91.2 billion. But it goes even deeper. In 2022, women in Iran cut their hair in public to protest the death of young woman Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested by the morality police for slipping off her headscarf.

In the US, Block noted, 24 states have passed the Crown Act, which prohibits schools and workplaces from discriminating against individuals based on how they wear their hair.

Hair is part of our lives,” said Block. “It is an ordinary material, but with extraordinary abilities and powers resonating within it.”

“In many ways, this book is about women’s history,” she added. “It’s about women’s lives and it’s a love letter to hairdressers.”