The politics of hair across several centuries

Hair has a peculiar set of properties that make it politically useful. It is on the outside of the head, so it is always visible. It can be altered at will and without pain, so compliance is possible. It grows back, so punishment is temporary but not trivial. It varies with ancestry, so it marks groups. And it carries religious obligation in several traditions, so regulating it puts a state directly into contact with belief.

Every authority that has wanted to make a point about who belongs and on what terms has, eventually, made it about hair.

Taxing the head

Two documented taxes make the point neatly.

In 1698 Peter the Great, having returned from western Europe determined to reshape Russian elite culture, imposed a tax on beards. Those who paid received a token as proof, and beard tokens survive in numismatic collections. The measure was explicitly about aligning appearance with a European model, and it met considerable resistance, because for many Russians the beard carried religious weight and shaving was not a neutral act.

In 1795 the British Parliament imposed a duty on hair powder, requiring an annual certificate from those who wished to use it. The motive was revenue for the war with France. The effect, combined with changing fashion and the political associations that powder had acquired, was to accelerate the decline of the powdered wig, as discussed in the essay on hairdressing. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a tax killing a fashion.

Requiring the covering

Compulsory covering has a long and varied history, ranging from religious obligation freely undertaken to state imposition.

The most frequently cited historical instance in the anglophone world is the set of ordinances issued in Spanish Louisiana in the 1780s, associated with Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró, requiring women of colour to cover their hair with a knotted cloth, the tignon. The measure is understood as an attempt to mark status visibly and to suppress the display of elaborate hairdressing by free women of colour. The response, widely reported and considerably harder to document precisely, is that the tignon was adopted as a distinctive and elaborate style in its own right. That response is a good story and it is repeated with more confidence than the sources support, though the ordinance itself is real.

Head covering as religious practice, across Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Sikh traditions among others, is a different matter and one this magazine treats with care: it is a practice with internal meanings, undertaken by people with their own reasons, and it becomes a political subject principally when a state intervenes either to require it or to prohibit it. Both have happened, in different countries, within living memory.

Forced cutting

The forcible cutting of hair as punishment or subjugation is one of the ugliest recurring practices in this history, and it is well documented.

The best known European instance is the public head shaving of women accused of relationships with occupying forces, carried out in France and elsewhere after the liberation in 1944. Photographs of these events are numerous and were widely published at the time. The practice was public, humiliating and gendered: the punishment marked the woman's body and left it marked for months.

Head shaving has also been used systematically in institutions, in prisons, in the military as an instrument of depersonalisation, and in residential schools and other assimilationist institutions where the cutting of children's hair against the practice of their community was an explicit instrument of cultural erasure. That last use is documented in several countries and has been the subject of formal inquiries.

A rule about hair is never about hair. It is about who is permitted to look like themselves.

The modern version

Contemporary hair politics in Britain operates mainly through employment and education, and it has become considerably more visible over the last decade.

The legal position is that hair discrimination can amount to race discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, because hair texture and protective styles are closely associated with racial and ethnic origin. Regulatory guidance for schools in Great Britain has addressed uniform and appearance policies that prohibit natural afro hairstyles or protective styles such as braids and locs, and has been explicit that such policies risk being unlawful.

Alongside the legal route sits a voluntary one. The Halo Code, launched in 2020, is a workplace and school pledge explicitly protecting staff and pupils who wear afro textured hair in all its forms. Comparable legislation in the United States, generally known as the CROWN Act, has been enacted in a number of states from 2019 onwards.

Institutions and their reasons

Institutional hair rules deserve a word, because they are the most common form and the least discussed. Armed forces, police, food production, healthcare and heavy industry all have appearance rules, and they mix genuine functional requirements with tradition in proportions that are rarely examined.

The functional cases are real: hair covering in food production, in surgery and around machinery prevents contamination and injury, as the wartime factory experience described in the rationing essay demonstrated at considerable cost. Respirator seal requirements genuinely constrain facial hair in specific roles.

The traditional cases are also real and are often defended in functional language they cannot support. The British Army's long standing requirement that the upper lip be unshaven, abolished in 1916, was not a safety measure. Rules requiring short hair in institutions where nothing is being operated are about uniformity, and uniformity is a legitimate institutional aim, but it should be named as such rather than dressed up.

The useful test, when meeting any rule about hair, is to ask what it would cost the institution to drop it. Where the answer is nothing at all, the rule was never about hair.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Equality and Human Rights Commission and the legislation.gov.uk both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.