OK. So, I know a little bit about this at least as far as Britain is concerned. Up until the 1850's beards were usually associated with "oriental" or "muslim" types, brigands, savages and republican riff-raff. The military was another association, but the Brits were never too fond of their army.

By the mid-century, however, this changed. Growing sentiments of nationalism and patriotism made support for the army a key part of "imperialist sentiment", and (some would argue) post-industrial-revolution angst about gender roles made physical differences between the genders important.

Enter the beard. So, during the 50's and 60's more and more writers began talking about facial hair as manly, or writing about scruffy-faced heroes as the new images of imperialist, western, "proper" masculinty. Sometimes it was because of the frontier, other times, a link to medieval knightly ideals. In all cases, the beard was the sign of the "true" man.

However, it's important to remember that, for all intents and porpoises, this was just an ideal. Even Thomas Carlyle, one of the key factors in the formation of this new bearded masculinity in his writings, supposedly only grew a beard after he lost a bet and had his friend confiscate his blades. And even when facial hair was at the height of its popularity, some people still went around clean shaven, even when they were key political figures (like Archibald Primrose, PM 1894-1895 or Ernest Henry Shackleton, polar explorer). In some cases this clean-shaven face was associated with counter-culture movements (Oscar Wilde, the dandy to end all dandies, is of course an example here) but, well, it's just a grooming choice.

So, to conclude this, while some people might have considered you as more "unmanly" because you couldn't grow a beard, it wasn't that big of an issue beyond, well, people making fun of you for not being up to snuff with current fashion. Like, a balding 20something who is really into Twisted Sister in the prime of Hair Metal or a flat-chested teenage girl at prom. These are fashion choices, and popular as they might be, aren't some north-Korean standard everyone has to adhear to. Nobody would discriminate against you, but some would see you as less "manly" and make fun of you behind your back.

Sorry if what's written above is messy or missplled, I have not had any sleep in a while and it's been four years since my paper about Victorian beards.

Further Reading:

• Oldstone-Moore, Christopher , “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain”, Victorian Studies 48:1 (Autumn 2005).

• Shannon, Brent, “Refashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity and the Cultivation of the Male Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914”, Victorian Studies 46:4 (Summer 2004).

• Walton ,Susan, “From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England”, Nineteenth Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30:3 (September 2008).

This is an honest and good question. Thank you for asking it. As with almost anything, it will depend on the exact time period, your social class, your employment and your geographical location. Speaking extremely broadly, in western Europe and the United States, male facial hair grew in popularity as the 19th century progressed, peaking in the 1870s, then declined toward the end of the century.

There are two principal sources that I would point you to: Rebecca Herzig's fantastic 2016 book Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, and a 2005 paper by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, entitled "The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain". This was published in the Autumn 2005 issue of Victorian Studies and is almost exactly what you're looking for. Oldstone-Moore subsequently published a 2015 book entitled Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair that is also worthwhile but less focused on your particular subject.

Herzig's book is necessary because it provides historical and social context that Oldstone-Moore doesn't have the space to give, even in a 27-page journal paper.

The bottom line is that from the 1840s onward, the beard (and facial hair in general) is seen as a representation of inner qualities of white, Western manliness. This is socially important in a society that is rapidly industrializing, because someone who works in a factory or behind a desk might not have other physical signs of his inward qualities. A beard was seen as a definitive sign of manliness, contrasting to the feminine face, and it was a sign of whiteness, the European ideal, because as white American and European writers frequently pointed out, beards were uncommon in Asia and among American natives. (They conveniently ignored Africans.)

T.S. Gowing's 1854 Philosophy of Beards was reprinted a few years ago as a humor/satirical work, but in its time, it used much of the same language as pro-beard authors and publications that were published seriously. (I can't speak to how Gowing intended his work.)

The same year that Gowing's work appeared in print, an article entitled "The Beard" appeared in Westminster Review. As its anonymous author stated:

"His potential beauty is not less than hers, but of a different, more complex, and severer order. When man's physical system is perfectly developed, his capacious chest and stalwart frame, overlaid with muscles of high relief, seem to us to require the beard for the completion of features fitted to harmonize with their vigorous outline. ... (The beard) identified as it is with sternness, dignity, and strength ─ is only the becoming complement of manliness."

Let's also talk about race with regard to facial hair (and body hair in general). This was a huge issue in the nascent United States, which was grappling with its policy toward American Indians. During the 19th century, there were serious attempts to classify race "scientifically," to pin down exactly what makes a person "white," "black," "yellow," or "red."

Anyone who says science is pure or somehow untainted doesn't know their 19th century history. As Herzig points out in a chapter entitled "The Hairless Indian," there were literally hundreds ─ if not thousands ─ of pages written by American researchers on American Indian hair removal techniques, all in the quest to determine if a lack of beards among American Indians was because they were naturally beardless or because they practiced some cultural technique that restricted facial hair growth.

This was seen as a critical question, because if Indians practiced hair removal, they could have beards, and were therefore closer racially to European whites. If they couldn't, then they were seen as more distant racially, and therefore inferior:

"As the Pennsylvania-born naturalist and traveler William Bartram posted the problem in 1791, at issue in Indian hairlessness was whether Indians might be persuaded to 'adopt the European modes of civil society,' or whether they were inherently 'incapable of civilization' on whites' terms." (Herzig, p. 20)

This issue of facial hair as a racial divider continued throughout the 19th century, particularly after On the Origin of Species became popular, and the wider public became interested in racial and ethnographic studies. The great scientific question of the 19th century was whether "white" people were so superior that the other people of the world could never match them, or whether those other people were held back simply because of their cultures.

The beard factored into the "answer" to this question.

But let's pull back now.

At the start of the 19th century, facial hair was not a mainstream fashion (and you should consider it as fashion, for all the discussions we've been having, which means it wasn't universal) in western Europe. It was the domain of radicals and artists. The English Chartrists adopted beards, as did political thinkers on the fringe (including Friedrich Engels, who grew one in 1840).

Following the Napoleonic Wars, European militaries adopted facial hair patterns pioneered by the French cavalry's famed moustaches and the French sappers' burly beards. Some English regiments even required their soldiers to have moustaches ─ even to the point of acquiring fake ones, according to an 1828 article in The Times.

In the 1840s, the British military star Gen. Charles Napier wore a beard in his Indian campaigns and encouraged his officers to do the same. At the time, there was a belief (reinforced by occasional popular and medical articles) that beards promoted good health because of a filtering effect. A beard, it was thought, was a relief to bronchial stresses caused by bad air (a perennial concern of the Victorian era).

In 1851, Col. Edward Elers Napier (no relation to the general) went so far as to write an article suggesting that British soldiers should be required to have a beard because of its healthful effects. The Crimean War led to new standards regarding beards in the French and British militaries and inspired newspaper editorials (from The Times, most interestingly) in favor of the beard.

When soldiers returned from the Crimea, they brought their beards with them.

The Victorian love for medieval history (at least, as they saw it) encouraged the growth of beards as well. Think of the 1835 painting The Chivalric Vow or the 1839 Eglinton tournament re-enactment, which encouraged beards as part of costume. This neo-medieval attitude encouraged beards as well.

Of course, with a rise, there is a fall. In the latter part of the 19th century, the industrial revolution is well established. There is no longer a crisis of masculinity about whether an industrial job is manly or not. The need for the beard decreases, and it is spurred out the door by bacteriological and health studies that rebuke the idea of beard as filter.

You can track the swing in popular fiction. The authors Thomas Carlyle and Charles Kingsley repeatedly wrote popular novels in which beards were representative of virtue. These novels, starting in the 1840s, seem to have been a big push in the beard movement. As Oldstone-Moore writes:

"Carlyle and Kingsley worried in particular about how men of mind and spirit might also be true men of the world. To both of these men, the great problems of the age depended on a resolution of this problem of manliness. In a time that seemed to them both soulless and sedentary, they imagined heroic men beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of urban modernity who succeeded in being both assertive and self-disciplined. And they gave their heroes beards to enhance this image of timeless and balanced masculinity. In so doing, Carlyle and Kingsley articulated a new rationale for beards well before they gained general respectability."

Kingsley's classic Westward Ho! is the most obvious example of this trope. To quote Oldstone-Moore, "he deployed a veritable beard code by which the reader might discern the moral worth of each character according to the condition of his face."

In other words, the better the beard, the better the man. The villains were clean-shaven or had tiny, dyed beards.

By the time Tarzan becomes a famous novel, its titular character is clean-shaven because he fears that his beard is a sign that he is turning into an ape: "True, he had seen pictures in his books of men with great masses of hair upon lip and cheek and chin, but, nevertheless, Tarzan was afraid. Almost daily he whetted his keen knife and scraped and whittled at his young beard to eradicate this degrading emblem of apehood. And so he learned to shave ─ rudely and painfully, it is true ─ but, nevertheless, effectively."

The implication is obvious: In popular fiction, the beard has swung from being a symbol of manliness to being a symbol of crudity and unrefinement. Practically speaking, World War I and the demands of gas warfare would all but eradicate the last vestiges of beard popularity. Under the hood of a gas mask, only a narrow strip of facial hair beneath the nose would work, and that style would subsequently become famous (and infamous) as one of its wearers gained prominence ...

Hello everyone,

If you are a first time visitor, welcome! This thread is trending high right now and getting a lot of attention, but it is important to remember those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and it can often take time for a good answer to be written. The mission of /r/AskHistorians is to provide users with in-depth and comprehensive responses, and our rules are intended to facilitate that purpose. We remove comments which don't follow them for reasons including unfounded speculation, shallowness, and of course, inaccuracy. Making comments asking about the removed comments simply compounds this issue. So please, before you try your hand at posting, check out the rules, as we don't want to have to warn you further.

Of course, we know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your frontpage or /r/all and see only [removed], but we ask for your patience and understanding. Great content is produced on this subreddit every day though, and we hope that while you wait, you will check out places they are featured, including Twitter, the Sunday Digest, the Monthly "Best Of" feature, and now, Facebook. It is very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time, so please do come check back on this thread in a few hours. If you think you might forget, send a Private Message to the Remind-Me bot, and it will ensure you don't!

Finally, while we always appreciate feedback, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with META conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!