Abstract
In March 1875, The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular American magazines, wrote: ‘The comb marks the course of refinement, and travels wherever the untutored savage is brought to yield to the benign influences of civilization.’ During the late nineteenth century, racial tension became inextricably linked with facial hair as Social Darwinists turned to the body—and specifically to hair—for signs of greater masculinity and racial superiority. Increasing sociological conflict propelled social theorists to address concerns that modernisation had rendered white men too tame and, thus, unfit to defend themselves against rival races. The moustache, or facial hair tamed, embodied a physical and aesthetic interface, mediating ideas of barbarism and civility. While examination of historic facial hair fashions has recently gained greater attention both in academic and popular literature, studies have yet to address facial hair as viewed through the lens of an artefact. A late nineteenth-century moustache comb in the collection of the New-York Historical Society inspires this study of the intersection of material culture and the stylistic evolution of facial hair according to changing constructions of masculinity. Designed to be carried in a pocket, the moustache comb materially parallels debates in society. That is, it unfolds to reveal the complexities and racial tensions of late Victorian manhood. Moustache combs simultaneously projected a cultivated, yet animalistic, masculine identity. As a civilizing implement made for and carried on the body, these objects exemplify the manifestation of cultural and social changes in the hirsute adornment of the ideal aggressive, yet civilized, man. Building on her Master’s thesis and subsequent research, the author argues how the moustache represented ideal manhood on an increasingly diverse American face.
This chapter is derived from my Master’s thesis at the Bard Graduate Center which was titled ‘The Things He Carried: Combing Masculine Identity in the Age of the Moustache’. I wish to express gratitude to my advisor, Ivan Gaskell, for his guidance and encouragement in exploring this unique subject.
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Notes
- 1.
“Combs ,” Saturday Evening Post (1839–1885), 13 March 1875, 8.
- 2.
For further discussion of race and facial hair see Eleanor Rycroft ’s chapter, “Hair, Beards and the Fashioning of English Manhood in Early Modern Travel Texts”, in this volume.
- 3.
Andrew Wilson , Health for the People (London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1886), 269.
- 4.
For nineteenth-century discussions of race and facial hair see: Charles Pickering, The Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854); Charles Darwin , The Descent of Man , and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1878); Andrew Wilson , Health for the People (London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1886); J. Lee Humfreville, Twenty Years Among Our Savage Indians (Hartford, CT: The Hartford Publishing Company, 1897).
- 5.
“Moustache Comb,” The New-York Historical Society , Z.1775, accessed 2 February 2016, http://nyhistory.org/node/35016.
- 6.
Phillip L. Krumholz, A History of Shaving and Razors (Bartonville, IL: Ad Libs Publishing Co., 1987), 112.
- 7.
Letter of receipt of “the folding pocket comb”, Librarian Dorothy C. Barck to Mr. Beecher Ogden , 3 January 1944, New-York Historical Society Institutional Archives, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.
- 8.
These photos are accessible through the New York Public Library and The Museum of the City of New York digital collections, accessed 23 September 2017, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?utf8=&keywords=Beecher+Ogden and http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspxVP3=SearchResult&VBID=24UAYWLNRSJUK.
- 9.
Mrs. Humphry, Etiquette for Every Day (London: Grant Richards, 1904), 280.
- 10.
“Advertisement 3—No Title,” Christian Union (1870–1893), 15 May 1890, 720. Contemporary values calculated using S. Morgan Friedman’s inflation calculator: www.westegg.com/inflation.
- 11.
Robert Friedel, Pioneer Plastic: The Making and Selling of Celluloid (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 73.
- 12.
Friedel, Pioneer Plastic, 73.
- 13.
“Advertisement 23—No Title,” The Youth’s Companion (1827–1929), 31 October 1895, 533.
- 14.
“Advertisement 22—No Title,” The Youth’s Companion (1827–1929), 21 October 1897, 524.
- 15.
The manufacture and consumption of personal grooming articles has an interesting history; see: Alun Withey , Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain : Refined Bodies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The moustache comb discussed in this chapter is a descendant of the grooming articles made for travel in the eighteenth century. Carried on one’s person, they illustrate how maintaining personal appearance was an ongoing effort. As personal grooming signified refinement, these objects were a social aid. Cleanliness and refinement became more closely intertwined into the next century. The transition in comb making in this period with celluloid democratised refinement, enabling more people to participate in polite society.
- 16.
“World’s Use of Pockets,” New York Times (1857–1922), 28 August 1899, 7.
- 17.
Jennifer Goloboy, ed. Industrial Revolution: People and Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008), 80. Goloboy discusses how ‘19th-century Americans seemed to believe that consumer goods could help represent the inner self’.
- 18.
“Advertisement 23—No Title,” The Youth’s Companion (1827–1929), 31 October 1895, 533.
- 19.
“Advertisement 22—No Title,” The Youth’s Companion (1827–1929), 21 October 1897, 524.
- 20.
Michael Kimmel , Manhood in America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 23.
- 21.
Kimmel, Manhood in America , 23.
- 22.
Wilson, Health for the People , 270.
- 23.
Wilson, Health for the People, 270.
- 24.
Timothy Mason Roberts , Distant Revolutions : 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2009), 160.
- 25.
Christopher Oldstone-Moore , “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain ,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 10.
- 26.
Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,” 10. His Framing the Face chapter reiterates the connection between political radicalism and the rise of the nineteenth-century beard.
- 27.
Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain ,” 12.
- 28.
Conrad Guenther, Darwinism and the Problems of Life: A Study of Familiar Animal Life, trans. Joseph McCabe (London: A. Owen & Co., 1906), 92. Guenther acknowledges the moustache’s place in military history, reflecting on how the moustache has historically been worn by soldiers for a more aggressive appearance. Photographs of American men illustrate a notable contrast from the 1850s to the 1860s. The sudden popularity of the moustache at a time of a major war could not have been a coincidence. M. Victoria Alonso Cabezas also remarks on the civilian adoption of facial hair in the nineteenth century and its military associations in her chapter in this volume, “Beardless Young Men? Facial Hair and the Construction of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Self Portraits”.
- 29.
John Whitelcay Chambers II, “Conscription,” in The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford University Press, 1999), 180.
- 30.
S. J. Lange, “Social Darwinism ,” in The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History, Volume 1, ed. Spencer Tucker (Santa Barbara, CA; Denver, CO; and Oxford, UK: ABC CLIO, 2009), 604.
- 31.
Lange, “Social Darwinism ,” 604.
- 32.
Matthew R. Dudgeon, “Darwinism,” in American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1, ed. Bret E. Carroll (London: Sage, 2003), 123.
- 33.
Kimmel, Manhood in America , 90.
- 34.
Kimmel, Manhood in America , 92–93.
- 35.
Charles Kassel , “Genius and Hair-Color,” Popular Science 81, no. 15 (September 1912): 284.
- 36.
John Burroughs , Journal of John Burroughs ,January–October 1883, John Burroughs Journals, Vassar College Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.vassar.edu/collections/burroughs. Also cited in E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 229.
- 37.
Kassel, “Genius and Hair-Color,” 285.
For an introduction to Thomas Henry Huxley’s scientific influence see:
Charles Blinderman and David Joyce, “The Huxley File,” accessed 24 September 2017, https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/. For Huxley’s racial classifications see: Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,” Critiques and Addresses (London: Macmillan and Co, 1873), 134.
- 38.
Kassel, “Genius and Hair-Color,” 284.
- 39.
Kassel, “Genius and Hair-Color,” 284.
- 40.
Henry Theophilus Finck , Romantic Love and Personal Beauty : Their Development, Causal Relations, Historic and National Peculiarities (London: Macmillan, 1887), 491.
- 41.
Finck, Romantic Love, 489.
- 42.
Sexual euphemisms referencing facial hair were nothing new. In the Renaissance facial hair served as a phallic euphemism. See Jennifer Jordan, “‘That ere with Age, his strength Is utterly decay’d’: Understanding the Male Body in Early Modern Manhood,” in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 36. Oldstone-Moore’s chapter in this collection also remarks on facial hair and sexuality .
- 43.
Humphry, Etiquette for Every Day , 280.
- 44.
Kimmel, Manhood in America , 85.
- 45.
Kimmel, Manhood in America, 85.
- 46.
Kimmel, Manhood in America, 134.
- 47.
Theodore Roosevelt , “Strenuous Life, 1899,” Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project, accessed 31 March 2012, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/.
- 48.
Richard Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 4.
- 49.
Kimmel, Manhood in America , 99–100.
- 50.
John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America , 1890–1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 61.
- 51.
Sarah Waldorf, “Physiognomy , the Beautiful Pseudoscience,” The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty, 8 October 2012, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/physiognomy-the-beautiful-pseudoscience/.
- 52.
Waldorf, “Physiognomy , the Beautiful Pseudoscience”.
- 53.
Waldorf, “Physiognomy, the Beautiful Pseudoscience”.
- 54.
Anthony Synnott , The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (New York: Routledge, 1993), 81.
- 55.
Oxford English Dictionary s.v. “Phrenology ”.
- 56.
Alfred T. Storey, ed. “The Face as Indicative of Character,” in The Phrenological Magazine, vol. 1 (London: L. N. Fowler, 1880), 423.
- 57.
Several scholars discuss the importance of self-control and manhood in Victorian America : Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Kimmel, Manhood in America ; Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
- 58.
Joanne B. Eicher and Sandra Lee Evenson, The Visible Self: Global Perspectives on Dress, Culture and Society (New York: Fairchild Books, 2015), 77.
- 59.
Tania Lewis, Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 28.
- 60.
E. M. Robinson, Illustrated Book of Instruction (Seattle, WA: The Robinson System of Barber Colleges, 1906), 61. This advice echoes a centuries-long concern about cosmetics and artificial appearances. Cosmetics were historically regarded with suspicion, especially when applied so heavily as to disguise rather than enhance. See Lynn Festa, “Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France ,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 25–54.
- 61.
Cecil B. Hartley , The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness; Being A Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in All His Relations Toward Society (Boston: J. S. Locke & Company, 1874), 116.
- 62.
Hartley, The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, 128.
- 63.
Humphry, Etiquette for Every Day , 280.
- 64.
Oxford English Dictionary s.v. “moustache cup”.
- 65.
“The Moustache Cup,” Puck (1877–1918), 4 December 1895, 12.
- 66.
“Treasure of the Month: Nineteenth Century Mustache Cups,” Rosenberg Library Museum, May 2010, accessed 10 February 2017, www.rosenberg-library-museum.org/displays/treasure/2010/05-cup/cups.htm.
- 67.
“Treasure of the Month: Nineteenth Century Mustache Cups”.
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“Treasure of the Month: Nineteenth Century Mustache Cups”.
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- 70.
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- 74.
Higher hygienic standards became necessary with urban development and industrialisation . Cleanliness not only prevented disease but also was a marker of class. See Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Twickler, S. (2018). Combing Masculine Identity in the Age of the Moustache, 1860–1900. In: Evans, J., Withey, A. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73497-2_8
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