Withey, Alun (Author)
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume: 36, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 225-243
How did new technologies inform conceptions of masculinity in Enlightenment Britain? This article explores the practice and material culture of shaving as an expression of polite masculinity. The eighteenth-century masculine ideal was clean-shaven. New types of steel meant sharper and more durable razors, in turn affecting the practice of shaving. Men at this time increasingly began to shave themselves rather than visit a barber. But razor-makers advertised their wares using carefully constructed discourses, linking razors -- and shaving -- to a broader male interest in science. Razors were thus simultaneously a product of, and a vector for, Enlightenment ideas.
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