I’m not saying you can’t be a feminist with smooth legs.
Last year, I made the decision to stop shaving my legs. I hadn’t necessarily made this choice out of some huge feminist epiphany; it was more the fact that I just couldn’t be bothered doing it anymore. The awkward positions in the shower, the little head unclipping itself from the razor spontaneously, the cuts on my legs. Not to mention all the money I was spending on those stupid pink taxed women’s razors. Having smooth legs was nice, but it just didn’t seem worth it to me anymore.
So these days I usually have hairy legs. This often reminds me of the first time I shaved. I was eleven or twelve and my mum told me that I should start off my leg-shaving journey right, and get them waxed. To this day, I have no idea why she thought that was a good idea. But I trusted her to make proper womanly decisions for me, so I said okay. I didn’t really see this as a big deal, but when I was telling my best friend about it, and my childhood crush walked past us and gave me a look, I realised: this was one of those woman things that you keep private.
For a while after that, I didn’t talk to boys about my legs; I kept them shaved, and kept quiet. I struggled to keep up with expectations, all while learning about feminism and the unfair expectations that were on me, but not on men. I choose to shave, I’d tell people. Feminism is all about choice, and I choose to shave. I like shaving! It’s my personal, unmanipulated choice. But I don’t know if this was really true. It’s easy to tell off the rude boy at school who commented on your day five legs; it’s also easy to go home and tell yourself you were planning on shaving today anyway.
I’m not saying you can’t be a feminist with smooth legs. But before you make that choice, it’s best to think through why exactly you want to do that. Let’s look at a bit of history. Unsurprisingly, it was shaving companies that had a sneaky part in why women shave today, and I think it’s safe to say money was a big motivator for them.
The man making this money was King Camp Gillette. Women started shaving their armpits in 1915, just over 100 years ago. Before this, no one really cared about our body hair, because it was always hidden along with the rest of our body. But in the early 1900s, women began to rid themselves of all the layers that they were expected to wear, and were now wearing sleeveless dresses that made the world aware of the fact that yes, women grew armpit hair. Women had freed themselves of one expectation, and Gillette was there to capitalise on that by creating a new expectation to replace it. One step forward and two steps back, am I right ladies? In 1915, Gillette introduced the Milady Décolleté razor, with advertisements that claimed that ‘the underarm must be as smooth as the face’ and that to be without embarrassment, a lady must shave her pits. ‘It’s off because it’s out’!
Leg shaving took a little longer to become popular, as women figured it was easier to just wear stockings. But eventually, because of war rationing, stockings became harder to get, and so Gillette got his way. According to the author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, Rebecca M. Herzig, ‘Gillette was very canny about increasing consumption of his products, and targeting women was one part of that strategy’.
I certainly wasn’t the first to break the trend. In Herzig’s book, she writes about ‘arm-pit feminists’ in the women’s lib movement, and an essay written in 1972 by Harriet Lyons and Rebecca Rosenblatt. Lyons and Rosenblatt wrote about an ‘emerging feminist consciousness’ that would counter these expectations that women shave their pits and legs. Herzig writes that hair removal was declared by Lyons and Rosenblatt to be ‘one more measure of the drudgery to which American women were unjustly subjected’.
I still shave my legs for special occasions, but mostly I’m happy being a hairy gal. And I don’t feel any less attractive; in fact I’ve been dressing up and experimenting with makeup looks even more since I stopped shaving. Hairy gals are gorgeous too. So yeah, I’ve mostly been leaving my razor to rust. Sorry, not sorry, Gillette!
-Words by Sarah Morcom
