Hair was popularly understood to be capable of quickly and reliably conveying important information about a stranger’s core identity—especially their gender (man or woman, masculine or feminine) or their race (African-, European-, or East Asian-descended, or indigenous to North America). Hair could illuminate intimate characteristics of their personality, such as whether they were courageous, ambitious, duplicitous, predatory, or criminally inclined.
In some contexts, hair was even considered more reliable than other body parts at communicating meaningful information about the body from which it grew—more so even than those body parts that usually dominate the study of the body and identity in modern American history, such as facial profile, skull shape, and skin color. As an influential white supremacist wrote in 1853, there was “nothing that reveals the specific difference of race so unmistakably as the natural covering of the head”—the hair.
To categorize hair alongside body parts like skulls and skin is intentional: hair was, indeed, conceptualized as a body part in the nineteenth century. Writers often used the word appendage to refer to hair, such as the Philadelphia hairstylist who described hair in 1841 as “the peculiar or necessary appendage of the human frame.” Moreover, even though barbers and surgeons had long separated into distinct professions, a haircut might be deemed an operation, and frequent haircuts could mean having “hair that is constantly kept bleeding under the scissors of the barber.”
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have largely overlooked this important nineteenth-century cultural belief because it is so different from our own. For the last century, hair has not generally been viewed as a body part: for most Americans, hair occupies a different mental category from legs or ears or even skin—parts whose skeletal or cartilage construction, whose connections to nerves and muscles, make them integral to the composition of a human body; hair, meanwhile, grows from the body, but is not part of the body.
In the nineteenth century, by contrast, hair was as essential to the body as any of its flesh-and-bone parts. Hair also continued to have significance and power even when it was detached from the body—preserved, perhaps, in a book or locket—because the strands of hair themselves functioned as a synecdoche for their owner.
By taking these assumptions and beliefs about hair’s relationship to the body seriously, this book reveals how nineteenth-century Americans came to understand their hair as a body part capable of indexing each person’s race, gender, and national belonging.