Those who are following politics in Washington, D.C., might have noticed a trend in recent years, especially among young men: the growing of beards. From Senators Ted Cruz and Chris Murphy to Vice President J. D. Vance and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, all are now donning facial hair as part of their image. One can only speculate what prompted this new fashion, but as Sarah Gold McBride’s Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America shows, this is not a new phenomenon. Both today and in the past, hair contained important social, cultural, and political meanings that have shaped how Americans understood themselves and others.

Focusing on the nineteenth century, Whiskerology details a period when society believed that hair—like other parts of the body—had the ability to reveal truths about a person, particularly regarding gender and race. In a time of great economic, social, and political transformation, many Americans were interested in finding ways to organize and understand the world around them. This impulse led to the rise of new scientific discourses that sought to classify, evaluate, and differentiate various bodies and their fitness to civic life. Like phrenology and physiognomy, the discourse of what McBride terms “whiskerology”—the science of hair—was central to debates regarding citizenship, rights, and identity.

McBride does not make claims for a comprehensive account of the cultural meanings of hair, nor does she address all forms of body hair, limiting her analysis to the head and face. Instead, she focuses on the discursive functions around hair, especially as a marker of racial and gender difference. The book’s four lengthy chapters focus on debates in which hair’s relationship to gender, race, and nation was particularly fraught: long hair, facial hair, the scientific study of hair, and hair’s ability to facilitate fraud. This approach allows McBride to highlight the intersectional and overlapping nature of these debates, as often hair was not only gendered but racialized in mutually reinforcing ways. Yet, it also makes the reading at times tedious, especially in long chapters that cover multiple points.

The first two chapters focus more directly on hair and hairstyles and how they were used to shape ideas about gender, race, and citizenship. Chapter one examines how short hair for men became by the nineteenth century a symbol of white masculine political power, marking people with long hair—whether women (for whom long hair was considered natural and beautiful) or Chinese people with their long-braided queue hairstyle—as ineligible for citizenship. Particularly engaging is the discussion about the political meaning of facial hair, for both men and women, in chapter two. While on white men, beards symbolized heroism and power, beards on Black men were seen as uncivilized. After the Civil War, however, Black men reclaimed the positive meaning of the beard, using it as a symbol of their civic equality. It was in this same moment that facial hair on women gained public prominence and was seen as freakish, McBride claims. Yet while the freak-show Bearded Lady character did not challenge norms of femininity in her appearance, the bearded woman trope became a tool to criticize suffragists who challenged patriarchal superiority by fighting for voting rights.

In chapter three, McBride delves deeper into the science around hair and its centrality to the development of a broader discourse of race science. Here she joins other notable publications such as Rachel Walker’s The Beauty and the Brain (2022), by providing a new and refreshing look into eugenic scientific discourses that have long been debunked. While not taking them at face value, McBride seriously grapples with these discriminatory assumptions and explains why and how people turned to hair, even more than skin tone, as a reliable source of information about a person’s character, behavior, and (mainly) race.

As McBride rightly notes, unlike facial contours, bones, and even skin color, hair was much easier to manipulate and change. Chapter four focuses on how hair’s inherent duality—being a biological feature that was easy to modify—shaped social anxieties as well as possibilities to redefine ideas of race, gender, and citizenship. Like science, technology offered new ways to straighten, dye, and manipulate hair that allowed for both gender and racial passing. McBride also explores wigs (a topic she also touches upon in chapter one) and artificial hairpieces, but a deeper discussion on the tension between false hair and hair fraud, and the role of “real” hair in determining authenticity would have made this chapter even richer.

McBride’s superb research skills and analysis are evident throughout the book, and her use of sources is innovative. She employs not only a variety of written sources, but also photographs, cartoons, music sheets, and even traces of real hair found in archives. This reviewer particularly appreciated her candid discussion in the introduction on the difficulties of writing about such an ephemeral topic that rarely appears as a subject in archival finding aids and book indexes. Also appreciated is her acknowledgment of the importance of digitization to the historian’s craft. It is rare to see databases such as ProQuest, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive mentioned by name and credited for facilitating research. This type of transparency is a good reminder—especially for graduate students—of what really goes into writing a book.

McBride is at her best when she discusses the particular meanings of hair on specific bodies, whether they were Chinese laborers, enslaved women, or Native American children. She makes it clear that hair has had and continues to have great meaning in American society, even if this meaning has changed from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. More concise chapters could have allowed McBride to focus on these stories and make this book not only a stronger narrative but also easier to assign to undergraduates. Nevertheless, those who are interested in the history of the body and its relations to both past and present politics will find a lot to explore and much to learn from it. “Hair is biology; hair is culture; hair is personal, and it is political,” McBride concludes (213). Indeed, if nothing else, this book makes one look at hair in a whole new way.