{"title":"'Hairy honours of their chins': whiskers and masculinity in early nineteenth-century Britain.","authors":"Alun Withey","doi":"10.1080/03071022.2022.2112863","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Studies of the Victorian 'beard movement' of the 1850s have demonstrated the close connections between facial hair and shifting ideas of, and concerns about, masculinity, gender, sexuality and modernity. The 'beard movement' is generally seen as the return of facial hair after 150 years of beardlessness. The turn of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a new and previously overlooked fashion for side-whiskers among young British men, one that initially caused controversy and ridicule, but which gradually became acceptable as a male accoutrement, and spurred a market for cosmetic products. What might be termed the 'whiskers movement' of the early 1800s offers a new and earlier perspective on facial hair as a form of embodied masculinity, and its place in contemporary debates about manliness, male fashion and appearance, sexuality and effeminacy, and political and revolutionary affiliations.</p>","PeriodicalId":21866,"journal":{"name":"Social History","volume":"47 4","pages":"395-418"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9555278/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2112863","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Studies of the Victorian 'beard movement' of the 1850s have demonstrated the close connections between facial hair and shifting ideas of, and concerns about, masculinity, gender, sexuality and modernity. The 'beard movement' is generally seen as the return of facial hair after 150 years of beardlessness. The turn of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a new and previously overlooked fashion for side-whiskers among young British men, one that initially caused controversy and ridicule, but which gradually became acceptable as a male accoutrement, and spurred a market for cosmetic products. What might be termed the 'whiskers movement' of the early 1800s offers a new and earlier perspective on facial hair as a form of embodied masculinity, and its place in contemporary debates about manliness, male fashion and appearance, sexuality and effeminacy, and political and revolutionary affiliations.
期刊介绍:
For more than thirty years, Social History has published scholarly work of consistently high quality, without restrictions of period or geography. Social History is now minded to develop further the scope of the journal in content and to seek further experiment in terms of format. The editorial object remains unchanged - to enable discussion, to provoke argument, and to create space for criticism and scholarship. In recent years the content of Social History has expanded to include a good deal more European and American work as well as, increasingly, work from and about Africa, South Asia and Latin America.