There is a meme about cutting bangs out of boredom during quarantine. It made me think about the idea of the Bryn Mawr chop, and about hair in the context of my research, specifically the cultural meanings of bobbed hair during the interwar years. 

I remember reading a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald called “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” published in 1920. In it, a socially graceless woman named Bernice lets her cousin Marjorie give her a makeover, teaching her how to dance, how to appear witty by plagiarizing Wilde, and how to flirt. Bernice’s go-to attention-grabbing line at parties is to tell people she’s considering bobbing her hair. When Marjorie gets jealous of Bernice’s newfound popularity, she manipulates Bernice into actually bobbing her hair. Her family is scandalized; all the boys lose interest in her. In the end, Bernice retaliates by cutting off Marjorie’s braids while she’s asleep.

It’s social satire, so it shouldn’t be read entirely at face value. But still it reflects reality to some extent, so in order to try to inhabit/approximate the early 20th century mentality regarding bobs, I sometimes substitute in a shaved head into mentions of bobs.

For example, this quote from Mrs. Howe, a speaker at BMC’s Sunday chapel talking about Bryn Mawr alumnus Fung Kei Liu (‘22): “The first time I saw Liu Fung Kei, she was a little girl with pigtails in the Canton Christian School…The next time I saw her she was a student at Bryn Mawr. She had *shaved* her hair and assimilated many American mannerisms.  Now she is back in China and has fitted back into the Chinese atmosphere miraculously well.” (This places Liu’s haircut sometime between 1918 and 1922, contemporaneous with Fitzgerald’s story.)

This from Frances King, who taught at the Shanghai Christian Medical College for Women: “Will you [be] surprised when I tell you that I have *shaved* my hair? It is so much more convenient, cleaner, and more comfortable. At present there are more women in Shanghai with *shaved* hair than with long hair.”

From Margaret Speer (‘22), when she was teaching at a missionary-run women’s college in China: “August [a Wellesley graduate] and I have *shaved* our hair. The few people who think my hair nice say I look like a flapper and a tomboy, which does not strike me as being my line.”

Hairstyles can mean a lot of different things. They can be an act of liberation or self-assertion. Or, like a military regulation crew cut or a prisoner’s shave, haircuts can be a way to impose an identity or underline a power dynamic. In 18th century France, the pouf, the tall, powdered style favored by Marie Antoinette and her courtiers, was immobilizing and impractical and functioned as a highly restrictive status symbol. For male students at Native American boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was an act of cultural erasure and of trauma. They were forced to wear short hair to conform with white conceptions of masculinity. Natalie Portman’s shaved head in the 2005 film “V for Vendetta” signifies both submission and rebellion.

Liu, King, and Speer, as college-educated women, were on the cutting edge when it came to embodying “modern” paradigms of femininity, with lifestyles that were still controversial, so it makes sense that they would embrace an avant-garde style like the bob. They’re aware that their hair is being read by others, and sometimes push back against these readings. King justifies her haircut in pragmatic terms and notes how common it has become. As a professional, Speer rejects the frivolous flapper connotation, and she also resists seeing the bob as anti-feminine. Howe, an older missionary educator, notes Liu’s bob with approval. For women like Howe, traditional Chinese womanhood meant such “uncivilized” practices as foot-binding and concubinage, so Liu’s bob was a sign of her Americanness and modernity. Contrasted with the “little girl in pigtails,” it was also a mark of maturity and coming-of-age. Howe’s linking of the bob with American culture is belied by the missionaries’ comments about adopting the bob because of the influence of urban Chinese women.

The phenomenon of bobbing, though it did originate in America, shows how conceptions of modernity and modern womanhood in the early 20th century resulted from a global conversation, and was not just a matter of other cultures imitating the West.