I understand that for women, in recent history, shaving became more practiced after WWI, with the arrival of shorter hemlines and sleeveless dresses showing (for the first time) skin, and therefore body hair.
I’m wondering if this was the first time that large-scale body hair removal was practiced? Has it been used in other countries/cultures as a way to increase one’s supposed sexuality? Was shaving always the preferred method or has plucking/waxing been implemented for the same effect? Also, WHEN did it become not only practiced but societally compelled? ie. body hair is unsexy.
I’m also vaguely looking for an historical explanation as to why body hair is seen as acceptable and attractive for men, and its seen as unappealing and unfeminine for women.
I have a couple earlier answers on the history of shaving and depilation. This one talks about the relationship between gender, sexuality, and shaving in the European Middle Ages. An excerpt:
Medieval art and literature make it clear that body hair was primarily a sexual symbol, associated as it biologically is with puberty. For men, this was primarily a positive thing. (After all, virility comes from vir, manly-man). Although male beauty was strongly tied to youth, what we might call 'manliness' was less so. For women, things were more complicated. Public hair/body hair did continue to represent unbridled sexuality.
But--so did its removal. Erasmus' Moriae Encomium (Praise of Folly) counts among its fools old women who prepare for their sexual exploits by tweezing their pubic hairs. The implication in that paragraph, particularly as paired with the immediately preceding enumeration of the follies of randy old men, is that they take this action to try to recapture their youthful, sexual days. Erasmus is of course writing satire, as are his contemporaries who ridicule prostitutes for trimming or completely removing The Hair Down There. That makes it hard to say how widespread a practice depilation actually was, on its own. But the common strand among the texts points to a deeply entrenched cultural value on pubic hair/pubic hair removal.
That's not the whole story, however. The specifically 20th century societal norm of women shaving armpits and legs is essentially the result of massive advertising campaigns to market razors, shaving cream, and such. This campaign, rather than straightforward sexuality, turns on the idea that women's body hair is dirty and only poor people can't afford razors to shave it. Shaving it is the proper, hygienic, middle class thing to do. /u/chocolatepot has discussed this in an excellent post as well.
Finally, there is the legendary and highly NSFW collaboration between /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and /u/kieslowskifan that is, essentially, a history of shaving pubic hair in porn and its cultural impact. (Seriously--big NSFW warning on that thread.)
If I can just add to /u/sunagainstgold's excellent comment, Islamic practice also dictates the removal of armpit and pubic hair for both men and women. I've written about this a bit before here but to both summarize and expand on some parts:
The hadith hold that both men and women should remove their armpit and pubic hair. In the latter case, this should be done at least once every 40 days. The text of the hadith most commonly mention that underarm hair is plucked "نتف" while the pubic hair is shaved "حلق", but in a classical context I don't think shaved necessarily means "with a razor." Lane's Lexicon for example, while emphasizing the definition of "shave" also includes "sheared" or "peeled the thing; or stripped off; or otherwise completely removed."
In practice this could be accomplished with depilatory creams (for example made with arsenic) or, in modern Egyptian practice at least, with honey or sugar based "waxing." I understand in contemporary American beauty parlors you can get this treatment as "sugaring" same concept.
This is part of the Islamic hadith, and while normally I'm a hadith skeptic who believes that much of this material was fabricated 100-200 years after the death of Muhamamd, the hadith hold that these practices are part of the "fitra" that is a kind of hygienic code that along with circumcision, trimming the beard, and trimming the fingernails, are held to be such basic practices that they would hold true even for unbelievers or before the revelation of Islam, sort of comparable to how the Noahide laws are supposed to apply to all of humanity.
Under the circumstances I find it hard to believe that these were narrowly Islamic practices for them to have been so widely accepted as essentially preceding Islam, although I can't recall ever coming across a source discussing it.
As a result, as I understand it, it's also basically a universal practice for Egyptian women, at least, regardless of their religion. So in that sense it has become a cultural practice as well as a religious one based as much on a concept of hygiene as of beauty or religious obligation.
In addition to the excellent posts above about the European and Islamic traditions, you may be interested in this conversation which looks at the methods of North American and Aztec male hair removal.