It took a while, but the Puritan view that linked femininity to long hair eventually prevailed. Wigs lost popularity partly owing to their association with English aristocracy. By the nineteenth century, long hair on men, too, faced cultural disdain: it demanded care that industrious citizens of the young Republic supposedly lacked the time for. Let privileged women endure laborious beauty rituals—men fussing over ringlets undermined what McBride calls the American ideal of masculine “self-mastery.” The Supreme Court Justice John Jay, in a letter to John Adams, lamented arriving late to an appointment because he’d been getting his hair done—“ridiculous fashion makes us dependent on valets and the Lord knows who.” The resentment spread. In 1796, one critic argued that wigs encumbered the “open, manly, independent foreheads, which have freely sweat for the toil of freedom.”
This wasn’t an easy sell. The Founding Fathers loved their wigs. Washington’s famous Gilbert Stuart portrait shows his white hair styled to look wiglike, McBride says. She cites Virginia wigmaker records showing that Jefferson purchased multiple wigs, queues, and three pounds of hair powder in the seventeen-sixties and seventies. Long-haired holdouts persisted well into the nineteenth century—Indigenous men, Chinese immigrants (often harassed for their queues), and white men like Butler, who was as devoted to his mane as any glam-metal rocker.
You might think the beard boom made up for hair’s retreat from the head. Maybe it did, in part. But McBride gives other reasons why, after a century of clean-shavenness, nineteenth-century men embraced whiskers. Beards emerged as legible emblems of male virility and authority just as women began demanding the vote. The beard vogue of the late nineteenth century, McBride notes, was unusual in that it inspired celebratory writing about the whiskers themselves. Pro-beard propaganda included the daft theory, floated by the widely published slavery apologist and physician John Van Evrie, that the “Caucasian is really the only bearded race, and this is the most striking mark of its supremacy.” (Frederick Douglass, splendidly bearded, remarked that Van Evrie must have grown “weary of his unprofitable twaddle about the negro’s brain” to resort to “disquisitions upon the beard.”) It’s no coincidence, McBride argues, that the bearded lady became a sideshow staple during this era of male whiskers and women’s-rights activism. The “enfreakment” of women with facial hair, she suggests, helped reinforce the idea that beards—and power—belonged to men. That might be a stretch. Did men really need beards to remind anyone that they were in charge? Still, McBride finds support in the anti-suffragist Horace Bushnell, who likened women voting to women growing beards, both being a “radical revolt against nature.”