Why do women continue the never ending battle of hair removal?
The growth of body hair is natural. Yet many American women, spawned
on
by advertisements of hair free models, smooth legs and bare armpits,
spend years of their lives shaving, plucking and waxing hair away.
There are no proven biological benefits to it, so why do women
continue
the never ending battle of hair removal? The answer to this question
is
simple yet complex. Simply stated: women remove their body hair
because
they are women and that's what women are supposed to do according to
our culture.

The following is a quote from Susan Basow from a post she made to a
Women's Study List in 1995 which sums up:

In my research, I found that in the U.S., prior to 1915, very few
women
removed underarm or leg hair. Then Gillette began "The Great Underarm
Campaign" to get women to shave with their new safety razor. The ads
emphasized "smoothing" the underarms and had a racist tone (to make
skin "white" and "fashionable" at a time when waves of
"dirty" "old-fashioned" immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy
and Ireland were flooding the U.S.). In the 1920s, the female
"look" was a boyish and youthful one (the flapper), but this is
also when women had won the vote and were leaving the domestic sphere
for the public one. Ads emphasized the importance for women to manage
their appearance in order to be sexually attractive to men. Leg
shaving
didn't become popular til the 1940s, and coincided with the shortage
of silk stockings due to the war (and the consequent bare-legged
look).
Ads emphasized attractiveness, neatness, cleanliness, and modernity.
Given that women were behaving more like men (in terms of jobs and
education), the gender lines became drawn on women's bodies: men are
hairy, therefore women must be hairless.

It appears that fashion has been the driving force behind the history
of hair removal for women in the 20th Century. Hair removal for women
had its beginnings in 1915 when Harper's Bazaar magazine showed a
fashion model wearing a sleeveless evening gown, baring shoulders and
underarms for the first time. The first advertising campaign for hair
removal was designed by an executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company
to convince American women that underarm hair was unhygienic and
unfeminine.
Hirsute ladies hane been done a great injustice!!