"Moloch of the Present Mode": Women's Short Hairstyles in Nineteenth-Century American Society

Authors

Jack Tingey, Brigham Young University

Keywords

Short Hairstyles, Moloch, Women's haircuts

Abstract

An article from Indianapolis journal in 1883 reported on the phenomenon of women cutting their hair short in the name of fashion, describing the process of a woman cutting off her long hair as akin to sacrificing virtue to the "Moloch of the present mode." Today, short hairstyles are more commonly associated with the bob of the Roaring Twenties, an era historians and popular culture recognize as one of excess, social change, and new innovations. But short hair on women was by no ~ans new in the 1920s. The bob was not the first short hairstyle in the United States but was the latest in a long line of fashionable short hairstyles dating to the mid-nineteenth century. A variety of circumstances contributed to the rise in popularity of short hairstyles after the Civil War, and contemporary accounts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries detailed many instances of women's short hair, aided by advances in communication and mass consumption, indicating that short hair on women was not only known but common. This trend had various impacts on society and set the precedents for the coming boom of short hair in the 1920s and the continued popularity of short hair into the twentieth century.

Recommended Citation

Tingey, Jack (2021) ""Moloch of the Present Mode": Women's Short Hairstyles in Nineteenth-Century American Society," The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing: Vol. 50: Iss. 1, Article 11.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/thetean/vol50/iss1/11