Can anyone tell me about when it became fashionable for women to shave legs and armpits?

Similar questions: fashionable women shave legs armpits.

It was of course for marketing purposes....but some women in other cultures, still don't shave their legs or underarms With help from an article entitled "Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture" by Christine Hope. According to Hope’s research, businesses began "encouraging" American women to shave their underarms around 1915, when sleeveless fashions became popular. Harper’s Bazaar featured an ad stating: "Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair."

Yet another revenue stream made possible by human insecurity. The war against nature’s leg warmers came a bit later, as changes in clothing allowed women to display more than just an ankle. According to Hope, convincing women to shave their legs was more challenging, so advertisers pulled out all the stops."Some advertisers as well as an increasing number of fashion and beauty writers harped on the idea that female leg hair was a curse.

" The Straight Dope offers another theory for the surge in leg shaving in the 1940s -- Betty Grable. The pin-up’s epic legs may have started a trend. Flaunting one’s gams was suddenly "in.

" Since short shorts and woolly limbs don’t mix, it was goodbye to hairy legs and hello to something equally pleasant -- razor burn. Here is another article I found that is interesting... The gist of the article is that U.S.Women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915.(Leg hair came later. ) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn’t know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.

To be sure, women had been concerned about the appearance of their hair since time immemorial, but (sensibly) only the stuff you could see. Prior to World War I this meant scalp and, for an unlucky few, facial hair. Around 1915, however, sleeveless dresses became popular, opening up a whole new field of female vulnerability for marketers to exploit.

According to Hope, the underarm campaign began in May, 1915, in Harper’s Bazaar, a magazine aimed at the upper crust. The first ad "featured a waist-up photograph of a young woman who appears to be dressed in a slip with a toga-like outfit covering one shoulder. Her arms are arched over her head revealing perfectly clear armpits.

The first part of the ad read ’Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair. ’" Within three months, Cook tells us, the once-shocking term "underarm" was being used. A few ads mentioned hygiene as a motive for getting rid of hair, but most appealed strictly to the ancient yearning to be hip.

"The Woman of Fashion says the underarm must be as smooth as the face," read a typical pitch. The budding obsession with underarm hair drifted down to the proles fairly slowly, roughly matching the widening popularity of sheer and sleeveless dresses. Antiarm hair ads began appearing in middlebrow McCall’s in 1917.

Women’s razors and depilatories didn’t show up in the Sears Roebuck catalog until 1922, the same year the company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves.By then the underarm battle was largely won. Advertisers no longer felt compelled to explain the need for their products but could concentrate simply on distinguishing themselves from their competitors. The anti-leg hair campaign was more fitful.

The volume of leg ads never reached the proportions of the underarm campaign. Women were apparently more ambivalent about calling attention to the lower half of their anatomy, perhaps out of fear that doing so would give the male of the species ideas in a way that naked underarms didn’t. Besides, there wasn’t much practical need for shaved legs.

After rising in the 1920s, hemlines dropped in the 30s and many women were content to leave their leg hair alone. Still, some advertisers as well as an increasing number of fashion and beauty writers harped on the idea that female leg hair was a curse. Though Hope doesn’t say so, what may have put the issue over the top was the famous WWII pinup of Betty Grable displaying her awesome gams.

Showing off one’s legs became a patriotic act. That plus shorter skirts and sheer stockings, which looked dorky with leg hair beneath, made the anti-hair pitch an easy sell. Some argue that there’s more to this than short skirts and sleeveless dresses.

Cecil’s colleague Marg Meikle (Dear Answer Lady, 1992) notes that Greek statues of women in antiquity had no pubic hair, suggesting that hairlessness was some sort of ideal of feminine beauty embedded in Western culture. If so, a lot of Western culture never got the message. Greek women today (and Mediterranean women generally) don’t shave their hair.

The practice has been confined largely to English-speaking women of North America and Great Britain, although one hears it’s slowly spreading elsewhere. So what’s the deal with Anglo-Saxons? Some lingering vestige of Victorian prudery?

Good question, but what with world unrest, the economic crisis, and the little researchers having missed their naps, not high on Cecil’s priority list. Here’s hoping some all-but-thesis Ph.D. Candidate will pick up the trail.

— Cecil Adams Sources: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-women-should-shave-their-legs-and-underarms .

Shaving arms and legs It started during the First World War. In the May 1915 issue of Harper's Bazaar, they ran an ad of a young woman in a dress with next to no sleeves. She had her arms raised above her head and showed bare armpits.

The copy of the ad read in part, "Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair. " A few months later, various ads promoted underarm shaving for hygienic reasons. One ad stated "The Woman of Fashion says the underarm must be as smooth as the face".

By 1917, McCall's magazine started featuring ads opposing arm hair. By 1922, the Sears catalogue started advertising women's razors and hair removal products. Many of the ads coincided with an increase in sleeveless dresses and tops.

Leg hair took much longer to conquer. It wasn't until World War Two that shaving leg hair became popular. Some attribute this phenomenon to a pin-up poster of Betty Grable showing off her bare legs.At the same time, skirts were becoming shorter and stockings were becoming sheer.

Sources: answerbag. Com .

Interesting reasearch! As long as women have cared about their looks they have looked for ways to remove hair. The recorded history of armpit hair is spotty, but the earliest reference is that the ancient Babylonians, more than one thousand years before the birth of Christ, developed depilatories to remove unwanted body hair.

The first direct reference to the specific topic at hand is contained in Ovid's Art of Love, written just before the birth of Christ: "Shall I warn you to keep the rank goat out of your armpits? Warn you to keep your legs free of coarse bristling hair? " However, in the 14th century the mere sight of any hair was considered erotic.

Women were required to wear head coverings; caps were worn indoors and out by woman of all ages. These ancient antecedents predict our current duality about body hair on women. On the one hand, underarm hair is considered unsightly and unhygienic, and yet on the other, sexy and natural.

The prostitures during the California Gold Rush Shaved all body hair to show that they were clean and lice free. It is said that the onset of modern day hair removal is credited to the first moviemaker who showed the feminine armpit extensively in non-pornographic films, Mark Sennett, in his Bathing Beauty movies. Early movie stars like Theda Bara and Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties shaved their legs and armpits, supposedly because Sennett preferred that look.

Then marketing got into the picuture with the May,1915 edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine that featured a model sporting the latest fashion (see ad below). She wore a sleeveless evening gown that exposed, for the first time in fashion, her bare shoulders, and her (shaved) armpits. Shocking at first, this soon caught on.At the same time a marketing executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company, which made razor blades for men, designed a campaign to convince women that underarm hair was unfeminine.

By 1917 the sales of razor blades doubled as women conformed to this feminine stereotype of shaving under their arms. It was only a short time later that legs came into the picture with rising hem lines. While in the Western countries we shave for aesthetic reasons, in Islamic culture, both men and women practice the removal of underarm hair for religious beliefs.

Sources: wikipedia, salon. Com .

From back in the days of the harem! Harem girls generally shaved every part of their bodies (including the genital area) except their heads in order to be more attractive, according to most literature on the topic of harems, so the custom of women shaving their hair has been around from at least the 17th/18th century.

In the twenties, during the prosperity that resulted from us "winning" World War I, our society abandoned religion. What we swapped it all out for was a look (the "flapper") that was boyish. Women were encouraged thru magazines to look younger by being more adolescent, even childish looking, which required hiding or eliminating those things that accompany adulthood: boobs ("silhouette" service), hair (shaving), long hair (the "bobbed" look, that is, short hair), and shorter skirts (chidren don't have to cover legs like adults should.) If you watch movies from then or about then, you'll see this that didn't exist in the teens while the U.S. Was at war.

Ironically, after WWII, our society did the opposite and became more conservative. Weird, huh? Danielpauldavis's Recommendations Thoroughly Modern Millie Amazon List Price: $14.98 Used from: $6.34 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 96 reviews) One example of many .

" "Sasquatches...I mean women...you know it's time to shave your legs when........?" "If a male was going to dress up as a lady for Halloween. Would you encourage him to shave his legs?" "Did Superman shave his legs so his tights wouldn't itch?

If a male was going to dress up as a lady for Halloween. Would you encourage him to shave his legs?

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.