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BEARDED WOMEN AND DOG-FACED MEN

Darwin’s Great Denudation

EVEN AS INDUSTRIAL and geopolitical change brought heightened attention to packaged depilatory powders, disdain for visible body hair remained relatively contained through the first half of the nineteenth century, an attitude considered specific to American “Indians.” Other than the men of science busily establishing racial differences in hair growth, the perfumers and druggists pushing treatments for low foreheads or side whiskers, and sideshow barkers seeking to profit from the exhibition of spectacularly hairy individuals, few Americans at midcentury appear to have given much thought to body hair.

After 1871, however, attitudes began to shift. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, perspectives on the relations between “man” and “brute” received a startling jolt.¹ Darwinian frameworks and vocabularies, spread by scientific and medical experts and by the popular press, came to exercise enormous influence on American ideas about hair, fur, wool, and the differences—such as they were—between them. After Descent, dwindling numbers of Americans would attribute visible differences in body hair to divine design or to the relative balance of bile, blood, and phlegm. Instead, differences in hair type and amount came to be described as effects of evolutionary forces: the tangible result of competitive selection. Moreover, the same traditions of comparative anatomy that helped to launch evolutionary theory provoked ongoing interest in the scientific analysis of body hair. Although these diverse experts never spoke with one voice on the significance of body hair, collectively they succeeded in pathologizing “excessive” hair growth. By the dawn of the twentieth century, hairiness had been established as a sign of sexual, mental, and criminal deviance.

ALTHOUGH DARWIN HINTED in his 1859 introduction to the Origin of Species that the book would shed light on the contentious subject of “man and his origins,” not until 1871’s Descent of Man did he seek to explain both how man was “descended from some pre-existing form” and how apparent variations in physical characteristics came to be: why some bodies are darker or furrier or smaller than others, and so on.²

Body hair played a pivotal (and underappreciated) role in both explanations. The evolutionary ideas often said to have been “discovered” by Darwin were actually pieced together from many sources; chief among those sources were earlier comparative studies of hair.³ Among the many details from his encyclopedic notes that Darwin included in Descent are accounts of the eradication of eyebrows in South America and Africa; of the monetary value (twenty shillings) accorded to the loss of a beard in Anglo-Saxon law; and of the Fuegian Islanders’ threat to a particular young missionary (“far from a hairy man”) that they would “strip him naked, and pluck the hairs from his face and body.”⁴ Darwin took many of these examples from two American sources: Catlin’s two-volume 1841 ethnography of the manners and customs of North American Indians and Gould’s massive 1869 survey of Civil War soldiers.⁵

If Darwin wished merely to describe the influence of the aesthetic in human evolution—the role of “beauty” once noted by James Cowles Prichard—he might have focused on any number of characteristics: eye size, hip-to-shoulder ratio, limb length. (Twenty-first-century evolutionary biologists analyze all these features and more.) Hairiness, however, forced particularly challenging questions about man’s relations to his primate fore-bears, as Darwin, like earlier naturalists, well realized. On the one hand, the very presence of hair would seem to fortify the claim that man is “descended from some ape-like creature.”⁶ As Darwin reasoned, “From the presence of the woolly hair . . . we may infer that man is descended from some animal which was born hairy and remained so during life.”⁷ And yet, that same thin scattering of hairs posed a rather inconvenient truth for the theory of natural selection, since the detriments of man’s relative hairlessness was readily apparent to anyone who had suffered through a clammy English winter. As Darwin explained, “The loss of hair is an inconvenience and probably an injury to man even under a hot climate, for he is thus exposed to sudden chills, especially during wet weather.”⁸ Darwin concluded that man’s “more or less complete absence of hair” reveals the limits of the arguments he laid out in the Origin of Species.⁹ “No one supposes that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man, so that his body cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.”¹⁰

The problem Darwin faced in the Descent, then, was to make sense of characteristics that were useless at best and injurious or downright lethal at worst, given natural selection’s overarching insistence that advantageous variations persist over others. This dilemma was embodied most fully in what Darwin called the great “denudation of mankind”—man’s loss of hairy covering.¹¹ Resolving this dilemma compelled Darwin to unfurl his controversial companion to the theory of natural selection: sexual selection. Thus the explicit goal of the latter sections of Descent, the chapters that discuss the inheritance of disadvantageous characteristics, is to show that such selection, “continued through many generations,” can produce effects on bodily form and appearance.¹² Ultimately, Darwin attributed most of the differences of concern to his nineteenth-century readers—why some creatures were stronger or larger or more colorful than others—to the action of sexual selection. As he concluded in the Descent, “of all the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals, sexual selection has been by far the most efficient.”¹³

DARWIN’S ADVOCACY OF sexual selection—and specifically its role in explaining man’s relative hairlessness—drove a wedge between Darwin and his longtime collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace.¹⁴ Like Darwin’s Descent of Man, Wallace’s major book on human evolution, his 1870 Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, wrestled with how to accommodate seemingly useless or disadvantageous characteristics within the confines of the theory of natural selection. Chief among these troublesome characteristics was what Wallace called the absence of “hairy covering” in man. Other characteristics were similarly inexplicable, Wallace proposed, but perhaps not to “an equal degree.”¹⁵ Considering man’s hairless condition against the backdrop of other similarly perplexing phenomena led Wallace to conclude that man’s nakedness demonstrated “the agency of some other power than the law of the survival of the fittest.” In his view, hairlessness could be explained in no other way. As Wallace put it, a “superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose,” by means of “more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with.”¹⁶

More steadfast evolutionists quickly jumped on this point. In one 1870 lecture, the Devonshire naturalist and theologian T. R. R. Stebbing lambasted Wallace for failing to recognize the capacious meanings of “utility” in the struggle for existence. “[W]hat is selected through being useful in one direction may incidentally become useful in another,” Stebbing argued. “Had [Wallace] employed his usual ingenuity on the question of man’s hairless skin, he might have seen the possibility of its ‘selection’ through its superior beauty or the health attached to superior cleanliness.”¹⁷ Stebbing further mocked Wallace’s claims by ridiculing the idea of God as some sort of primordial cosmetologist:

[I]t is surprising that he should picture to himself a superior intelligence plucking the hair from the backs of savage men . . . in order that the descendents of the poor shorn wretches might, after many deaths from cold and damp, in the course of many generations take to tailoring and to dabbling in bricks and mortar.¹⁸

Such trappings of civility, Stebbing insisted, are “nothing more nor less than part and parcel of natural selection.”¹⁹

Recognizing body hair as the key point of contention, Darwin zeroed in on both Wallace’s statements and Stebbing’s critique. In Descent, Darwin echoed Stebbing’s dismissal of Wallace, and reasserted the absurdity of thinking that hairlessness was God’s way to force early men “to raise themselves in the scale of civilization through the practice of various arts.”²⁰ Hairlessness had an explanation, to be sure—but its explanation was earthly rather than divine: men’s election of “superior beauty and cleanliness.” In the midst of his most important statement on human evolution, Darwin narrated his break with Wallace as a disagreement over the origins and purposes of body hair: where Wallace saw divine determination, Darwin saw individual choice.

“CHOICE” FOR DARWIN did not necessarily involve anything one might now consider deliberation or calculation on the part of the chooser. “As far as sexual selection is concerned,” Darwin wrote, “all that is required is that choice should be exerted.”²¹ Even if the individual member of a species does not intend to produce consequences on the bodies of his remote descendants, consequences there will be. As Darwin put it, “[A]n effect would be produced, independently of any wish or expectation on the part of the men who preferred certain women to others.”²² He repeated this point for emphasis: “[U]nconscious selection would come into action.”²³ The potential for unconscious selection is key, since, again, the theory was developed to account for those features, such as hairlessness, which were, in Darwin’s words, “of no service” to animals “in their ordinary habits of life.”²⁴ Man’s “partial loss of hair,” Darwin argued, is thus one of those “innumerable strange characters . . . modified through sexual selection.” It is not hard to believe, he assured, that a characteristic as injurious as hairlessness had been acquired in this way; for “we know that this is the case with the plumes of some birds, and with the horns of some stags.” Although unwieldy horns and plumes might obstruct key activities such as eating or escaping predators, females might find them attractive enough that, over time, an aberrant trait might eventually become widespread.²⁵

But herein lies the problem. Quite unlike the fancy horns of the Irish elk or the resplendent plumage of the Bower-bird, human hairlessness is, according to Darwin’s own examples, a cultivated characteristic, the product of meticulous care. “[M]en of the beardless races,” Darwin himself wrote, “take infinite pains in eradicating every hair from their faces, as something odious, whilst the men of the bearded races feel the greatest pride in their beards,” and care for them accordingly.²⁶ While sexual selection might well explain characteristics that seem to confer no other evolutionary advantage, the question remains as to exactly how one confers the effects of ornamental grooming on one’s offspring.

So how did early humans lose their hairy covering, if not through the inheritance of acquired characteristics—the very principle, proposed by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that Darwin is generally credited with refuting? At this key juncture of the Descent of Man, Darwin skirted the Lamarckian implications of his explanation by employing the passive voice:

As far as the extreme intricacy of the subject permits us to judge, it appears that our male ape-like progenitors acquired their beards as an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex, and transmitted them to man as he now exists. The females apparently were first denuded of hair in like manner as a sexual ornament.²⁷

How that “first denudation” happened, occurring as it did when denudation was of no particular service, remains murky.

THE MURKINESS OF this narrative did not elude critics. One particularly witty 1871 satire by Richard Grant White—Shakespeare scholar, journalist, and father of the architect Stanford White—highlighted the problems posed by Darwin’s account of the great denudation by retelling the story of man’s descent from the point of view of gorillas (figure 3.1).²⁸

The story of The Fall of Man, the gorilla narrator tells us, began “[l]ong ago,” when, through a “deplorable freak of nature,” one male gorilla was born deformed, almost entirely without hair. But the gorilla was not shunned; rather, many of the young female gorillas, showing the “unaccountable caprice of their sex,” developed “a hankering after this young fellow.” He declared himself “not a marrying gorilla” and announced to his crowd of yearning females that “until he found one whose coat was even softer and slighter than his own, he [w]ould remain a bachelor.”²⁹ A particularly lovesick female gorilla grew determined to win his favor. Day and night, she fretted over how to rid herself of her “disgusting coat of coarse hair.”³⁰

One fateful day the lonely, lovesick gorilla sat down against a tree to muse on her problems, without realizing that the tree was coated with thick, half-dried gum. While she sat there pining, “[t]he hair on the outside of her arm [became] imbedded in the gum, which, drying as she leaned, held her fast.”³¹ As there were no other gorillas nearby to help free her, the young female decided that she had no option other than to rip herself free: “Summoning all her fortitude and her force, she threw herself forward and fell upon the ground with a scream that might have been heard afar off, for she had torn out by the roots every hair that had touched the tree.”³² Once her pain passed, the gorilla worried that she might now be even more repulsive to the object of her affection, given the raw, bare patch on her arm. But before long, the gorilla narrator continues,

Figure 3.1. Richard Grant White satirizes Darwin’s explanation of the relative hairlessness of “man” (1871).

[S]he was led from despair to hope by a strange way of thinking which man calls reason. . . . [S]he thought that if the object of her love longed for a female with a coat softer and finer and sparser than his own, he might, . . . therefore (but who of us can tell what therefore means?), possibly like one better yet who had no hairy coat at all.³³

THUS SHE BEGAN. She remained hidden in seclusion as she returned to the gum tree week after week, until she had denuded her entire body with this “new depilatory.” When her “sacrificial transformation” was finally complete and she revealed herself to the male gorilla, he was totally enamored by the smooth limbs that “all unknown to him, had suffered such torment for his delight.”³⁴ She continued her self-treatments with the gum tree, and also continued to conceal the “artifice [to which] she owed her hairless skin.”³⁵ When she later gave birth to a relatively hairless boy, the narrative concludes, the baby “inherited from his mother those strange thoughts, ‘therefore’ and ‘I am ashamed.’”³⁶

The Fall of Man made comically explicit what Darwin, Wallace, and Stebbing left implicit: stories about body hair reveal larger assumptions about suffering, choice, and what ultimately separates “man” from other animals. Whether a “superior intelligence” plucked the hair from savage men to drive them to tailoring and brick-laying, or whether some early ape determined the course of this “sacrificial transformation,” explications of humans’ relative hairlessness conveyed implicit social values.

AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS, WELL aware of the profound implications of Darwin’s ideas, largely ignored or outright rejected the claims made in Descent through much of the century. But already by the mid-1870s, American botanists, geologists, and ethnologists were adopting evolutionary frameworks and applying them to their work. Coinciding with sociologists’ interest in the historical implications of competitive forces, Darwinian ideas were absorbed into American thought more broadly.³⁷

The influence of evolutionary vocabularies is manifest in post-Descent representations of extraordinarily hairy people, many of whom were displayed in nineteenth-century circuses and freak shows as “dog-faced men” or “bearded ladies.”³⁸ The celebrated midcentury performer Julia Pastrana provides a case in point (figure 3.2). Prior to the Civil War, exhibition handbills characterized the famously hairy Pastrana as a “hybrid” of woman and “Ourang-Outang,” a member of a “race of savages” from Mexico, or the offspring of an Indian and a bear. Said to possess exquisite moral and temperamental faculties, Pastrana allegedly represented that point “where man’s bestial attributes terminate and . . . those that are Divine begin.”³⁹ Yet after Darwin expressed interest in Pastrana in his 1868 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (describing her as a “remarkably fine woman” with a “gorilla-like appearance”), she and other similarly hairy individuals were renarrated as “splendid illustration[s] of Mr. Darwin’s theory.”⁴⁰ A photograph of a thirteen-year-old girl in Vienna with “skin more like a fur than anything else,” one weekly concluded, might be used to illustrate new editions of Darwin’s work.⁴¹ The girl noted earlier, Krao, similarly was exhibited as a “living specimen” of the ancestral ties between men and monkeys.⁴² Discussing the case of a “dog-faced boy,” one physician noted that he had cause to doubt whether such patients were “member[s] of the human family.”⁴³

Figure 3.2. An undated depiction of the mid-nineteenth-century performer Julia Pastrana, reproduced in The Living Races of Mankind (1900).

Evolutionary understandings of body hair were not limited to the exceptionally hairy people discussed and displayed as “freaks.” Along with a plethora of popular cartoons conveying Darwin’s ideas (or Darwin himself [figure 3.3]) through images of hairy monkeys, more mundane representations of hair also began to reflect evolutionary frameworks.⁴⁴ Our “hairs,” reported one popular weekly in 1873, “are appendages of the skin, contributing to its defence,” their thickness “regulated by the law of Nature.” Hair is no “less useful because it is ornamental.”⁴⁵ Hair’s status as an artifact of selective pressures was also affirmed by allusions to the similarities between man and beast; in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the once-controversial claim that “hoofs and hair are homologous appendages” became largely taken for granted.⁴⁶ The term “well-groomed,” for instance, first coined in 1886, referred evenly well to horse or man.

Figure 3.3. A popular post-Descent caricature of Darwin as a “Venerable Orangoutang,” first published in the satirical magazine the Hornet (1871).

AS EVOLUTIONARY IDEAS about hair seeped into everyday conversation, scientific and medical experts grew more concerned with what became known as “excessive” hair growth. Aesthetic concerns were transmuted into questions of evolutionary fitness. In 1878, seven years after the publication of Descent and one year after the first meeting of the newly formed American Dermatological Association, a Danish physician proposed a new disease category for the individual, “homo hirsutus,” said to suffer from excessive hair: hypertrichosis.⁴⁷ Subsequent practitioners began to diagnose disease when hair was found to be abnormal in location, quantity, or quality. As one physician working on the subject succinctly stated, “hypertrichosis is defined as an unnatural growth of hair.”⁴⁸

But which hair, exactly, was to be considered unnatural? Predictably, the new diagnostic category produced a recurrent dilemma for clinical practice: distinguishing pathological levels of hairiness from ordinary hair growth. As with nymphomania (excessive sexual desire), alcoholism (excessive drunkenness), and other diseases first labeled in the nineteenth century, the criteria used to diagnose hypertrichosis were flexible and contested.⁴⁹ Experts disagreed, for instance, on how to demarcate the soft downy hairs known as lanugo (widely considered “normal”) from the “strong,” dark growths thought to be indicative of disease; in the words of one physician, “the one verges into the other almost imperceptibly.”⁵⁰ Making matters more difficult, experts trying to pin down a single definition of excessive hair identified racial variations in both hair growth and perceptions of that growth. Some reported a tendency for hypertrichosis in patients “of Jewish and Celtic extraction,” others in patients of Russian or Italian descent.⁵¹ Still others justified the exclusion of “negroes” from their studies of hair growth by insisting that a “deficiency of secondary hair is frequent in these people as compared to Caucasians.”⁵² Meanwhile, the fine amounts of facial hair on the “Mongolian, the American Indian and the Malay,” one specialist pointed out, might lead these peoples to find grotesque the prodigious quantity of hair “that is ordinarily found on the faces of Europeans.”⁵³

Despite such diagnostic confusion, sorting normal from excessive hair became a pressing concern for late-nineteenth-century experts, who approached visible hair, particularly visible facial hair on women, as a crucial if often confusing marker of ill health. Post-Darwinian medical texts were rife with detailed classifying schema, designed to assist physicians in diagnosis. One dermatologist carefully delineated six types of hairy patients who might appear requesting treatment, from the woman with “a very fine white lanugo on the upper lip and sides of the cheeks” (which “is noticeable only to herself and should not be treated”), through the brunette with a short fine mustache (which “adds a certain artistic picture which is natural for that type of individual” and should also be left untreated), up to the patient who “shows coarse, stiff, long hairs” that “occupy the same regions as the male beard” (“This condition is a real indication for treatment”).⁵⁴ In especially complicated cases, the dermatologist explained, the presentation of the woman patient’s “male secondary sex characteristics” is “shown by her expression as well as the distribution and coarseness of the hair.”⁵⁵ When nature was functioning properly, experts after Descent presumed, men had body hair, and women did not.

More precisely, young women did not have body hair. Consistent with evolutionary arguments concerning sexual selection, physicians typically proclaimed hairiness to be of medical significance only for premenopausal women. Reproductive pair bonding was the goal. As physician Adolph Brand explained, the practitioner’s primary encounter with hypertrichosis was among women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, “[t]his being the period of a woman’s life during which her physical charms receive her greatest attention.”⁵⁶ Another expert suggested that the “great majority” of cases of hypertrichosis affected women between the ages of twenty and thirty.⁵⁷ The age of the patient affected not only medical diagnosis but also medical treatment. One physician reported a colleague’s therapeutic principles: “While his indications are humane and even chivalrous to female sufferers under twenty-five years, his advice [is] not to yield to the entreaties of a married woman.” For patients over forty-five, the physician advised forgoing all treatment.⁵⁸

Body hair’s role in sexual and reproductive fitness was further emphasized by medical reports of patients’ subjective experiences of hairiness. One of the few women physicians recorded in the related literature, Dr. Henrietta Johnson, described “one beautiful and attractive woman” who “would not marry, lest the hairy tendency which had made her own life a wretched one, and which she had tried by every known artifice to conceal, might be transmitted to her female offspring.”⁵⁹ (Johnson did not elaborate further on the “hairy tendency.”) Emphasizing young women’s deep, instinctual desire for hairlessness, dermatologist Ernest McEwen similarly insisted that women themselves yearned for effective treatment.

The woman afflicted feels herself an object of repulsion to the opposite sex, and as a result, set apart from the normal members of her own sex. She realizes that she bears a stigma of the male and that she does not run true to the female type; therefore, every female instinct in her demands that the thing which marks her as different from other women be removed.⁶⁰

Although they could not agree on clear standards of “normal” hairiness, physicians remained assured that for young women, abnormal hair growth ran counter to “female instinct.”

ONGOING ATTEMPTS TO quantify and classify hair growth reflected broader efforts to discern exactly what “excessive” hair might signal about its possessor. Born of the same anthropometric traditions of comparative measurement and observation that gave rise to Darwin’s theories of variation, diverse groups of investigators began counting hairs as a way to engage wider social and political concerns. Their analyses were part of a significant cultural shift ongoing in the late nineteenth century: one moving “deviance” from its traditional location in criminal law to the domain of medical science.⁶¹

Particularly influential in this regard was the young field of study known as “sexology,” which approached most so-called sexual abnormalities not as perversions of a person’s object of desire (as later concepts of homosexuality would imply) but as reversals or confusions of one’s own sex role. Sexual deviance was defined largely by the observation of “virile” traits or habits among women or “effeminate” traits or habits among men. Early sexologists in Europe and North America thus focused on the observation of such traits and habits in individuals, enumerating and categorizing their case reports into various types of sexual “inversion.”⁶² The most influential sexologists of the late nineteenth century—Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Albert Moll—concentrated these observations on “secondary sexual characteristics.” Secondary sexual characteristics, Krafft-Ebing explained, were those “bodily and psychical” traits, such as facial hair or breasts, that develop “only during the period of puberty” and help “differentiate the two sexes.”⁶³

Of course, the very concept of secondary sexual characteristics implied the possibility of slippage between “primary” and “secondary” identifications, and sexologists readily acknowledged the myriad difficulties of aligning the two. Sexologists further determined that inversions, forms of sexual deviance, were often subtle, complex, and even contradictory. “Observation teaches that the pure type of the man or the woman is often enough missed by nature,” Krafft-Ebing wrote, “that is to say that certain secondary male characteristics are found in woman and vice versa.” Examples might include “men with an inclination for female occupations (embroidery, toilet, etc.)” and “women with a decided predilection for manly sports.”⁶⁴ The complexities of sexual classifications were amplified, sexologists believed, by racial variation in secondary sexual characteristics: “The higher the anthropological development of the race, the stronger these contrasts between man and woman, and vice versa.”⁶⁵ As sexologists sought to distinguish the truly “pathological” inversion from a mild fondness for embroidery or boxing, sorting genuinely “feminine” characteristics from the “masculine” became paramount.

Body hair, considered one of the leading secondary sex characteristics, presented particular challenges to this effort. To begin, hair growth was troublingly unpredictable, varying from individual to individual, from life stage to life stage, and from season to season. Moreover, hair’s connection to sexual inversion remained uncertain, even as sexologists meticulously examined patients’ bodies for signs of “unusual” hair growth.⁶⁶ The clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, assessing the body hair of more than 500 men, claimed a link between sexual roles and relative amounts of hair. He determined that the beards of 132 of the “inverted” men in his study were “‘sparser than in average men’”; another 98 “had no body hair at all, 78 had unusually fine body hair, and 176 had body hair less dense than in average males.”⁶⁷ Those findings were disputed by Krafft-Ebing, whose scrutiny of the face, trunk, pubic region, and extremities found no similar correspondence between hairiness and inversion.⁶⁸ For Krafft-Ebing, it was less hair itself than attitudes toward hair that indicated sexual abnormality. To illustrate the point, Krafft-Ebing described the case of a “silent, retiring, un-social, and sullen” man who arrived at an asylum at the age of twenty-three. Over his years in the institution, “his personality became completely feminine.”⁶⁹ Along with a request for women’s clothing and a transfer to the female wing of the hospital (where he might find protection from “men that wished to violate him”), the patient demanded the application of an “‘Oriental Hair-Remover’” in order that “no one may doubt” his true sex. For Krafft-Ebing, the patient’s manifest distaste for his own body hair, rather than his relative degree of pilosity, was the real indication of “deviance.”⁷⁰

As equivocal as they were on the relationship between body hair and male sexual inversion, early sexologists were equally mystified by hair’s relationship to female inversion. Some insisted that hair growth in a “masculine” pattern suggested a deeper confusion of sexual role; others reported that women with flowing beards tended to exhibit exemplary “feminine” characteristics in all other respects. The most influential and authoritative sexologist in America in the 1890s, British physician Havelock Ellis, reflected this wider ambivalence about the meanings of hair. Ellis, an honorary member of the Chicago Academy of Medicine, member of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, and vice president of the International Medical and Legal Congress of New York, confronted the relations between hairiness and female sexuality directly in his first American publication. In 1895, he declared it “a mistake to suppose that bearded women approach the masculine type,” particularly because female inverts may appear without “any trace of a beard or moustache.”⁷¹ Two years later, however, Ellis revisited that confident assertion, allowing that one of the female inverts he had studied did indeed have an “unusual growth of hair on the legs.” Writing in the first English-language medical textbook on the subject of sexual inversion, he further proposed that “[a] woman physician in the United States, who knows many inverts of her own sex, tells me that she has observed this growth of hair on the legs.”⁷² Whether visibly hairy legs or upper lips indicated female deviance remained open to debate.