cjh@csin.UUCP (Chip Hitchcock) (09/26/83)
TITLES: our machine, which has a fortune file to which all sorts of strange types have contributed, occasionally comes up with the following: MISS (n): a title by which we brand unmarried women to indicate they are in the market It's more-or-less credited to THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY, although there are a lot of items credited to it which definitely weren't written by Bierce. As some people have extended the discussion to -"why Ms/Mr instead of M for everyone?"- I recall a comment of Asimov's in response to the people who complained that with men letting their hair grow you couldn't tell them from women, that under most circumstances ]male or female?[ should not be a relevant datum. HAIR: I know at least one woman age 40 who lets her hair go long enough to sit on, although she almost always binds it up. She is forceful enough (and good enough at computer-related work) that she hasn't had complaints about her career (she also virtually never wore dresses between going to college and well into her first pregnancy at 36---but Boston is a good deal easier for career women than the Midwest). My sister, on the other hand, spent several years trying to get her hair to waist-length, and got fed up with taking care of it, cutting it to collar-length before reaching her original goal and some time after breaking up with someone she'd been quite serious about. But I ran across some interesting data in random reading. A review of HESTER STREET (film that was around here a while back) mentioned an Orthodox Jewish custom that I recall as cutting hair \all the way/ back and wearing a wig; an article on marriage customs in late-medieval England said that a bride's hair was commonly cut (or at least bound up to look cut) at the wedding itself "as a symbol of her unfree condition (peasants and bondservants wore short hair)." (The article also said the bride's father gave the groom one of the bride's slippers as a symbol of the transfer of dominance, the slipper being tapped on the bride's head at the altar and put conspicuously on the husband's side of the nuptial bed. Other articles have made it quite plain that such dominance was not entirely substantial, especially since a woman had to manage her husband's estate in his absence.) I'm not sure that long hair on women is still generally considered sexy, although hair well above the collar line tends to look severe (a lot of short cuts are also heavily styled, even permed, which I personally tend to find less attractive. Is it possible that American women have been socialized into regarding stylable hair as a sign of adulthood, not to mention the money and time to spend on it? I remember my mother remarking that none of the women in my college chorus had done anything with their hair for a concert . . .).