Comb

Public Access Description:

This comb was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

Comb-making in France was regulated by the guild of comb-makers (peigniers), which admitted women if they were widows taking over their husband’s trade. Since comb-making could take place within the household, the wives and daughters of comb-makers are likely to have also assisted their husbands and fathers administratively, and probably also helped out in the workshop itself. Elsewhere in Europe, notably Venice, women could be full members of comb-makers’ guilds.

Combs like this were intended for use by all genders. As long hair and beards became more fashionable during the mid- and late-seventeenth century, it became more common for men, and sometimes women to use combs like this in public. Religious commentators condemned this practice as immodest on the part of women, and as evidence of frivolity and vanity on the part of everyone. Men in particular were criticised for letting hair-styling distract them from more important matters such as war, politics and religion.

In the early modern period, to accuse a man of frivolity, vanity and excessive concern for his appearance was to implicitly feminise him. Accusations of ‘effeminacy’ in this period did not carry connotations of same-sex attraction as they do today: instead, they indicated excessive attraction to women. A man who was ‘effeminate’ was unable to exert ‘masculine’ rational control over his sexual and emotional attraction to women, and had likely spent too much time around women – both of which might result in him spending too much time combing or styling his hair, either because he was influenced by women or because he wanted to attract them.

Curatorial comment:

This comb was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. This project aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam.

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, and building on the existing curatorial research available on ‘Search the Collections’, research on this object revealed the following:

The move towards boxwood as a comb material in late medieval and early modern Europe, and away from antler or bone, may be partly attributable to the increasing popularity and exclusivity of deer-hunting as an aristocratic homosocial activity, which resulted in deer antlers being unavailable to artisans. However, this activity also contributed to wood shortages, as forests were reserved for hunting rather than wood-gathering: comb-makers competed for wood not only with other artisans, but with householders who needed to gather wood for domestic fuel. Consequently, although box grows in the British Isles and mainland Europe, it was also imported from the East Indies.

Combs were a popular courtship gift, usually from men to women rather than the reverse (women usually gave handmade gifts in return). Combs could also be implicated in seduction: since loose or uncovered hair for women was seen as sexually transgressive, hair-combing on their part could itself be read as a seductive act, and the styling of their hair was understood as a deliberate attempt to attract male attention. Some beauty accessories also depict women combing men’s hair as an erotic act.

Cosmetics, beauty products and grooming accessories like this comb were only gendered as exclusively feminine during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when men’s cosmetics were reframed as toiletries and health-related products. However, this did not mean that early modern men could comb their hair without censure. For example, an anonymous 1641 text on Protestant martyrs exclaims, ‘Thinke I pray you what a shame it were for a Gentleman, who, being called by his Prince to fight in his warres, should busie himselfe onely about combing, curling, and perfuming his haire, tooting all day in a Looking-glasse, to decke and attire himselfe’. Similarly, the 1620 pamphlet written against gender nonconformity, Haec-vir: or, The womanish-man, asked an archetypal ‘Feminine-Masculine’ person: ‘why doe you curle, frizell, and powder your hayres, bestowing more houres and time in deviding locke from lock, and hayre from hayre, in giving every thread his posture, and every curle his true sence and circumsperence then ever Caesar did in marshalling his Army...?’

Combs were also used to rid beards and hair of lice. As animals which sucked blood from naked bodies, and in which the blood of several people could mingle, lice – like John Donne’s The Flea – had sexualised connotations.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• Anon, Haec-vir: or, The womanish-man: being an answere to a late booke intituled Hic-mulier (London: Eliot’s Court Press, 1620)
• René de Lespinasse, Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris : XIVe-XVIIIe siècles. Tissus, étoffes, vêtements, cuirs et peaux, métiers divers (1886-97), volume 3, Gallica < https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55440899>
• Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006)
• Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’, Feminist Studies, 8:1 (Spring, 1982), 46-80

Further reading

• Anon, A Continuation of the histories of forreine martyrs from the happy reign of the most renowned Queen Elizabeth, to these times (London: Richard Hearn, 1641)
• Christopher Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (Routledge, 2002)
• Ron Bowers, Combs, Combmaking and the Combmakers Company (Honiton: R. C. Bowers, 1987)
• Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London: Laurence King, 1998)
• William Diville, ‘La Vie Industrielle dans la Vallée Moyenne de l'Eure’, Annales de Normandie, 3ᵉ année, 1 (1953), 69-77
• Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Boydell Press, 2012)
• Lisa T. Sarasohn, ‘The Microscopist as Voyeur: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Philosophy’, in Melinda S. Zook (ed.), Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women: Essays Presented to Hilda L. Smith (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 90-114
• Mark A. Swiencicki, ‘Consuming Brotherhood: Men’s Culture, Style and Recreation as Consumer Culture, 1880-1930’, Journal of Social History, 31:4 (summer 1998), 773-808
• Paul Warde, ‘Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c.1450–1850’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006), 28-57