title: Mustaches and masculine codes in early twentieth-century America.
abstract: 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.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Oldstone-Moore
mesh_terms: D006197:Hair; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D057228:Masculinity / Q000266:history; D008571:Men / Q000193:education / Q000523:psychology; D054526:Men's Health / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D010551:Personality; D012919:Social Behavior / Q000266:history; D014481:United States / Q000208:ethnology