Mustaches and Masculine Codes in Early Twentieth-Century America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9075867 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Oldstone-Moore (Wright State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 47-60 |
| Publication date | 2011-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-4529 • E-ISSN: 1527-1897 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jsh/shr002 |
| PMID | 22164885 |
| OpenAlex | W2004514385 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 2 |
The purpose of this article is to deepen our understanding of twentieth-century masculinity by considering the social function of facial hair. The management of facial hair has always been a medium of gendered body language, and as such has elicited a nearly continuous private and public conversation about manliness. Careful attention to this conversation, and to trends in facial hairstyles, illuminates a distinct and consistent pattern of thought about masculinity in early twentieth-century America. The preeminent form of facial hair - mustaches - was used to distinguish between two elemental masculine types: sociable and autonomous. A man was neither wholly one nor the other, but the presence and size of a mustache - or its absence - served to move a man one way or another along the continuum that stretched from one extreme to the other. According to the twentieth-century gender code, a clean-shaven man's virtue was his commitment to his male peers and to local, national or corporate institutions. The mustached man, by contrast, was much more his own man: a patriarch, authority figure or free agent who was able to play by his own rules. Men and women alike read these signals in their evaluation of men.
Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Sister · Sociology · State (computer science) · Academic Freedom and Politics · American History and Culture · Anthropology · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,11 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2017 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |