The Woman Beneath the Hair: Treating Hypertrichosis, 1870-1930

Abstract

Seeking to elucidate understandings of sexual difference held in past, this article examines emergence of one disease, hypertrichosis. Prior to 1930, hypertrichosis (excessive hairiness) was a disease defined, in part, by a confusion of sexed appearances. Diagnosing and treating this condition, then, necessitated some operative definition of sex, an index of normal against which to distinguish truly pathological. The standard of normal female identity that emerges in discussions of hypertrichosis centered not (as one might now expect) on a distinguishing physical characteristic; rather, physicians represent sexual identity as revealed in their patients' yearning for hairlessness, their desire to run true to the female type. Patients and their physicians were both left to struggle to achieve this type, an ideal which fluctuated with fashion, age, and culture. Historical analysis of hypertrichosis thus extends feminist scholarship which challenges presumed universality and timeless permanence of the female body. Rather than presuming the nature of women experiencing this woman's disease, this essay attends to specific kinds of work involved in dividing hairy bodies into two distinct sexual categories.

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