Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig

a deeper confusion of sexual role; others reported that women with flowing beards tended to exhibit exemplary “feminine” characteristics in all other respects. The most influential and authoritative sexologist in America in the 1890s, British physician Havelock Ellis, reflected this wider ambivalence about the meanings of hair. Ellis, an honorary member of the Chicago Academy of Medicine, member of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, and vice president of the International Medical and Legal Congress of New York, confronted the relations between hairiness and female sexuality directly in his first American publication. In 1895, he declared it “a mistake to suppose that bearded women approach the masculine type,” particularly because female inverts may appear without “any trace of a beard or moustache.”⁷¹ Two years later, however, Ellis revisited that confident assertion, allowing that one of the female inverts he had studied did indeed have an “unusual growth of hair on the legs.” Writing in the first English-language medical textbook on the subject of sexual inversion, he further proposed that “[a] woman physician in the United States, who knows many inverts of her own sex, tells me that she has observed this growth of hair on the legs.”⁷² Whether visibly hairy legs or upper lips indicated female deviance remained open to debate.