Masculinity, Modernity and Male Baldness, c.1880‐1939

Abstract

Male baldness was a very common experience but it has rarely been considered by historians of any period or place. This article argues that baldness reveals a precariousness and vanity to masculinity in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Britain. Baldness limited men's ability to self-fashion their appearance. It made them the target of jokes, marked the fact they were getting older, undermined their looks and, perhaps, made them less attractive to women. There was thus a vigorous market for cures and preventatives. Such products show how deep superstitions and irrational thinking could run, but understandings of the condition were also rooted in the social and cultural conditions of the day. The glamour of Hollywood, a keep-fit culture, growing advertising of male-grooming products and the fading of hat wearing from fashion, all intensified interwar anxieties around baldness. Not everyone worried about baldness, however, and men's feelings about their hair owed much to personality and circumstance. Baldness thus not only reveals the precarious nature of masculinity but also its inconsistent and inherently personal dimensions.