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- #21
We can phyllosoph around for decades about what is acceptable or not. Taking todays standards shaving is obsolete. But I do believe in grooming very much. Men being gents and women being ladies. My grandparents were both working class poor factory workers however my grandpa was always extremely well shaved and wore a lot of fancy suits. Was extremely intelligent and had Royal manners and military habits. My grandma has a little bit lower standards being a village, field working woman but she is still a lady and when she saw on tv that some women nowadays are growing their armpits or that they skip regular maintenance of the hair on their legs or that they don’t use deodorants she almost threw up.Also movies and documentaries,etc.
Chiming in on the ladies side of things... Body hair wasn't as much of a taboo. This of course might have changed for the rich and famous, but the average factory girl wasn't trying to get a BBS shave on her legs, and possibly might not be doing underarms at all.
Also, nylons were much thicker then, and so perfectly shaved legs to go into ultrasheer stockings wasn't a thing. I imagine that women that went bare-legged except of "liquid nylons" (sort of cream fake tan) or "paint on seams" (nylons had seams, nylon was scarce in the war years, draw on a seam to fake you are wearing stockings) probably made more effort to make sure they had as close a shave as they could muster.
To consider, not all poor people, or women, had access to shaving supplies on a frequent basis. Even today that holds true, as someone that knew enough struggling students making cartridges last until they, or the blade, screamed. Also culture, not so much today, but in my student days, knew a number of women (and no, not all immigrants or strident feminists) that didn't shave their undearms very often.
To be fair, it was more the 40s and earlier when body hair was less of a thing. By the 1950s, in part because of post war boom, and mass marketing, there was more emphasis on hair removal. On the whole, it was an on-going push from the 1800s forward, with some strange pathways of evolution, sanitization, stigmatization of hair, etc. This applied to men as well, as the 'hairy man' was touted as brutish/uncivilized, and women were 'masculine' or 'unsanitary'. Which was an odd switch, because prior to that, there was also a lot of upset that many indigenous people with less body hair, that explorers/naturalists considered very uncivilized. As the saying goes, you can't win for trying.