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insanely horrible, yet quite psychologically compelling and to the point. One, in 1922, raised this pertinent question — “Can any woman afford to look masculine?” — and followed with this answer: “Positively not! And moreover there is no excuse for your having a single hair where it should not be.”
    The battle against leg hair came next, in a stage that Hope coined as “Coming to Terms with Leg Hair.” Leg-hair removal didn’t catch on quite so quickly, mostly because women could cover up their legs with stockings.
    The upper class adopted the trends first, as hairlessness had been marketed as a status symbol, but by the 1930s, the practice had trickled down to the middle class. The hairless leg deal was sealed during WWII, when stockings became scarce.
    These ads made me angry, but for some reason, these ads caught on; they must have spoken to something — an insecurity or lack or desire — because they stuck so profoundly.
    The idea that leg hair is gross is so ingrained that I’d even read a study that during puberty, twice as many girls as boys develop a fear of spiders. When asked to describe the spiders, girls more often than not depicted them as “nasty, hairy things.” This happens around the same time they start getting rid of their own body hair. Spiders! Sheesh.
     
    ***
     
    Why did we embrace hairlessness? When I spoke with Jennifer Scanlon, a women’s studies professor at Bowdoin and author of Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture, she told me said that woman shouldn’t be seen completely as victims of the advertisers.
    “Women had a role in this, too,” Scanlon said. That figured. She told me that women were searching for something at that time; they wanted self-esteem, sensuality and independence.
    “The culture wasn’t offering them these things,” Scanlon explained, “but advertisers did. They said if you remove your armpit hair, you’re going to feel like a sensual being.”
    “So,” I said, “you’re saying that instead of hair removal, the advertisers could have just as easily been like, ‘Chicken livers are the answer. Rub these livers all over your body and you will feel sensual.’”
    “Yes,” Scanlon said, “it was about filling a need.”
    But the ads for leg hair and pit removal weren’t the worst thing I learned. When I met up with my friend Maggie one morning for coffee and a discussion of my reporting to date, I told her what was.
    “Dude, ladies irradiated themselves to remove hair!”
    “What?!” she said.
    I’d found out about it in an article written by Rebecca Herzig, a professor of gender studies at Bates College. When radiation, and more specifically the X-ray, was discovered in 1896, scientists found that besides killing carcinomas, it also eradicated hair. X-ray epilation clinics opened up all over the United States. By the early 1920’s, there were already reports that exposure to radiation could be dangerous. Yet clinics continued to stay open and offer the hair-removal service. By 1940, it was outlawed, so these radiation salons began operating via back alleys like illegal abortion clinics. The women were lured in by the “pain-free” procedure and kept there with the brochures that espoused everything from social acceptance to the socio-economic advancement that would come from obtaining “smooth, white, velvety skin.” They specifically targeted immigrant women who might feel marginalized due to their foreign (and hairier) origins, which I related to being a hairy Jew. Maggie understood; she’s a hairy Italian.
    Many women suffered gruesome disfigurement, scarring, ulceration, cancer and death all because of the extreme pressure to become hairless. The women who were adversely affected were dubbed the “North American Hiroshima Maidens,” named after the women who suffered radiation poisoning after the nuclear bombs hit Japan in WWII. To some women, hairlessness has literally