Rapunzel's Daughters
What Women's Hair Tells Us About Women's Lives
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first book to explore the role of hair in women's lives and what it reveals about their identities, intimate relationships, and work lives
Hair is one of the first things other people notice about us--and is one of the primary ways we declare our identity to others. Both in our personal relationships and in relationships with the larger world, hair sends an immediate signal that conveys messages about our gender, age, social class, and more.
In Rapunzel's Daughters, Rose Weitz first surveys the history of women's hair, from the covered hair of the Middle Ages to the two-foot-high, wildly ornamented styles of pre-Revolutionary France to the purple dyes worn by some modern teens. In the remainder of the book, Weitz, a prominent sociologist, explores--through interviews with dozens of girls and women across the country--what hair means today, both to young girls and to women; what part it plays in adolescent (and adult) struggles with identity; how it can create conflicts in the workplace; and how women face the changes in their hair that illness and aging can bring. Rapunzel's Daughters is a work of deep scholarship as well as an eye-opening and personal look at a surprisingly complex-and fascinating-subject.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This earnest roundup of anecdotes, interviews, statistics and remarks about hair and self-image among women in postwar America is engaging enough, but there's not much news here. Apart from a short historical survey at the beginning that includes a few suggestive facts, the only really informative part of this book is the chapter called "At the Salon" where we learn a good deal about the profession of hairdressing: who does it, what its economics are, how its distinctive caste system works. To be fair, information is not really Arizona State University sociologist Weitz's aim. Her main goal is to authorize a common feminine obsession with hair (her own included, of course) as a subject of serious discussion. It is also, worthily enough, to make the discussion more inclusive than other books like this often are. Weitz interviews many minority women, children, lesbians and older women, but her analysis of this rich material suffers from insufficient depth of cultural perspective. Weitz avers that hair is a uniquely powerful medium of self-presentation, but makes no attempt to distinguish between hair and dress, say, or between head and facial or body hair. Observing that the typical black hair salon functions not as a feminine preserve but as a community meeting place, she finds little large-scale significance in its public and private constructions of the activity of coiffing. Similarly, she alludes to different meanings attached to long hair, short hair or hairlessness mostly in terms of different individual experiences. The overall effect is diverting, well-intentioned light reading (including 16 pages of b&w photos) that doesn't quite fulfill the subtitle's promise.
