American women haven't always shaved their legs. When they started, it apparently had as much to do with fashion as personal hygiene.
In research for Professor Suellen Hoy's history seminar Chasing Dirt in America, history major Kelly Van Voris discovered that, unlike other cultures, 92 percent of U.S. females 13 and older shave their legs today.
Hardly any did in the 1920s. Back then the practice was associated with chorus line dancers, Van Voris says. Men and women alike considered it somewhat immoral and risque.
The country's increasingly snooty awareness of cleanliness and personal hygiene in the first half of the 20th century may have started the razors rolling. Van Voris cites a 1982 article in the Journal of American Culture, "Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture," in which author Christine Hope argues that "superfluous hair" gradually came to be considered defective in character, offensive and often smelly.
Shorter skirts and abbreviated bathing suits certaily helped the cause along, and cosmetician Helena Rubenstein was on the cutting edge of the trend. Her influential 1930s beauty book elevated the removal of hair from underarms and legs to the same category of necessity as washing hair or manicuring nails.
Van Voris says legs became increasingly seen as an element of feminine beauty during and after World War II. Recall pin-up girl supreme Betty Grable and her million-dollar legs. The shortage of silk stockings during the war also forced some women to go barelegged for the first time. By then, Van Voris reports, showing unshaven legs in public was cause for social embarrassment.
Hairless legs aren't entirely a product of fashion, though, the student argues. She notes that even during in the 1950s, when skirts were relatively long, women continued to shave or use other means of hair removal.
Leg-hair removal had become a "cultural habit," she says. And it still signals to the world "the distinctiveness of Americans and their preoccupation with grooming and overall cleanliness."