Were the real women of the day as suspicious of their body hair? Historian Sandra Cavallo has noted that in the 16th century there was an “explosion in treatments for facial appearance,” evidenced by the many “books of secrets” left behind; they share DIY cosmetic advice on how to remove hair from every part of the body (all while keeping the hair on one’s head luscious and thick!).

Neoclassicism Jean-Honoré Fragonard In the 18th and early 19th centuries, especially in France,“revived” the ideals of the Greco-Roman tradition. The French bred a culture with a heightened sense of eroticism . Artists likeplayed with euphemism in his works, but didn’t stray far from the tropes that had been defining women’s sexuality for hundreds of years. In his painting Girl with Dog (ca. 1770), Fragonard mischievously displaces the female subject’s sex with a little dog over her exposed genitals; her pet’s tail stands in for her pubic hair.

In this increasingly modern era, Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (1975), there was an “emergence of unprecedented discipline directed against the body” in the second half of the 18th century. Cosmetics, dieting, and depilation, became de rigueur, self-governing practices that continue to regulate women’s lives today.