Why tonsure women

I still remember feeling how I would never have the courage to do it if I ever wanted to. Jennifer Edwards, the year-old cofounder of ILikeBetter. For religious reasons?

Was I in treatment for cancer? These are generalizations, but usually women got it and saw it as a powerful act—and guys wanted assurance that there was a reason behind my decision.

However, a motivating factor for some women was the intimate connection between female baldness and health, with many choosing to donate their hair for medical wigs or sheering their hair in solidarity with family members who have undergone cancer treatments. For Gabrielle Garcia, shaving their head has allowed them to explore the different parts of their gender expression.

I feel powerful, accepting, and like I am honoring the part of myself I chose to validate. Others, however, were exhausted from the pressure to maintain their look.

Ashley had been experiencing some major natural hair fatigue before she decided to shave off her curls. I was just over it. Jayshree, on the other hand, was experiencing a fatigue I understand all too well.

The oh-she-used-to-look-good-look-what-happened-to-her-now! If I just do it now, I would have enough time to adjust to it. Living in quarantine, Ruby Deas, a year-old makeup artist and barista, also wondered how much control she really had over her own body if she allowed what other people might eventually think dictate her decision. I was creating my own standard of beauty. But the question remains: Why now? Quarantine has gifted these women, in a world where our bodies are so heavily policed and objectified, the solace of decision-making without public opinion.

One thing is for sure: Some of us will have a few more recipes under our belts, a new skill or two, a new appreciation for beauty and simply being outdoors. She tried to pacify them by saying that her husband would send money to her account which they the women can distribute among themselves.

After thrashing her, they shaved off her head, painted her face black and stripped her off," she added. Meanwhile, taking strong action against the blatant misuse of the law by the group of protesters, police have detained as many as 10 women based on the viral video.

Interrogation of the women is underway. Demanding fair evaluation of Plus 2 examinations, an ex-regular girl student attempted suicide on Monday September The protesting student slit her palm in front of Council Like they have no other option. There's something deeply fraught about that -- though perceptions are slowly changing. From ancient Egypt to Darwin. Hairlessness wasn't established as a mandate for women until the early 20th century. Before that, removing body hair was something both men and women did -- as far back as the Stone Age, then through ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire -- using seashells, beeswax and various other depilatories.

In these earlier eras, as Victoria Sherrow writes in "Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History," hairlessness was seen mostly as a way to keep the body clean. Ancient Romans also associated it with class: The smoother your skin was, the purer and more superior you were. But unibrows were actually considered alluring for both sexes, and were often accentuated with kohl. Threading -- which removes facial hair -- has long been a traditional beauty procedure, as seen in this picture at a Taipei night market.

A thin thread is doubled, then twisted and rolled over areas of unwanted hair, plucking the hair at the follicle level. In Persia, hair removal and brow-shaping was a marker of adulthood and marriage for women, and was mainly reserved for that occasion. While in China, body hair was long considered normal, and even today woman face far less social pressure to shave. The same goes for other countries in Asia: While hair removal has become routine for many of the continent's young women, waxing or trimming pubic hair, for instance, isn't as common as it is in the West.

In fact, in Korea, pubic hair was long considered a sign of fertility and sexual health -- so much so that, in the mids, it was reported that some Korean women were undergoing pubic hair transplants, to add extra hair to their own.

Europeans weren't always obsessed with hair-free skin. In the Middle Ages, good Catholic women were expected to let their hair grow as a display of femininity, while keeping it concealed in public. The face was the only place where hair was considered unsightly: 14th-century ladies would pluck the hair from their foreheads in order to push back their hairlines and give their faces a more oval appearance.

When Elizabeth I came to power in , she made eyebrow removal fashionable. By the late 18th century, hair removal still wasn't considered essential by European and American women, although when the first safety razor for men was invented by French barber Jacques Perret in , some women reportedly used them too. It wasn't until the late s that women on both sides of the Atlantic started making hair removal an integral part of their beauty routines.

In Paris, a patient undergoes a hair removal session using an Alexandrite laser. Darwin's theory of natural selection associated body hair with "primitive ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, 'less developed' forms," wrote Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College in Maine. Conversely, having less body hair, the English naturalist suggested, was a sign of being more evolved and sexually attractive. As Darwin's ideas became popularized, other 19th-century medical and scientific experts began linking hairiness to "sexual inversion, disease pathology, lunacy, and criminal violence," Herzig continued.

Interestingly, those connotations were applied mostly to women's body hair, not men's -- not just because of evolutionary arguments but also, the author pointed out, the enforcement of "gendered social control" on women's rising role in society.