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U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915.

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The Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.

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Around 1915, sleeveless dresses became popular, opening up a whole new field of female vulnerability for marketers to exploit.

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In May, 1915, in Harper's Bazaar, a magazine aimed at the upper crust. The first ad "featured a waist-up photograph of a young woman who appears to be dressed in a slip with a toga-like outfit covering one shoulder.

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A few ads mentioned hygiene as a motive for getting rid of hair, but most appealed strictly to the ancient yearning to be hip. "The Woman of Fashion says the underarm must be as smooth as the face," read a typical pitch.

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The budding obsession with underarm hair drifted down to the proles fairly slowly, roughly matching the widening popularity of sheer and sleeveless dresses.

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Anti armhair ads began appearing in middlebrow McCall's in 1917. Women's razors and depilatories didn't show up in the Sears Roebuck catalog until 1922, the same year the company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves.

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The related ads from this time are pretty comical. The tag line for one I found reads You need not be embarrassed, and continues, When you go to the beach this summer, are you going to be afraid to raise your arm? Are you going to shrink from the scrutinizing glance of your friends?

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Marg Meikle Dear Answer Lady, 1992 notes that Greek statues of women in antiquity had no pubic hair, suggesting that hairlessness was some sort of ideal of feminine beauty embedded in Western culture.

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Western culture never got the message. Greek women today and Mediterranean women generally don't shave their hair.

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The practice has been confined largely to English-speaking women of North America and Great Britain, although one hears it's slowly spreading elsewhere.

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Armpit hair is the most difficult haircessory to rock.

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