I know there has been different fashions in beard and hair throughout history. But has there ever been fashionable before to shave the pubic hair, or is our generation making history as the first to shave our pubic hair?
Not at all. For one thing, women in Renaissance and Classical art are ubiquitously hairless, and by and large they are most certainly not pre-pubescent. Aristophanes mentions women plucking and shaving the pubis in the Lysistrata. We have multiple references to women singing their pubic hair, and we know that in antiquity women plucked or shaved their body hair in general quite frequently--one of Aristophanes' favorite insults is to accuse men of plucking themselves. Ovid babbles at length about shaving, plucking, rubbing yourself with pumice to remove hair. Hell, the Egyptians were plucking their pubic hair, along with hair from all over their bodies, way back in the Bronze Age
It appears that it has always been a requirement in Islam.