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A BBC World Service interview with Susan Basow, Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology, is available through a BBC web site link to its “Everywoman” radio program. Basow’s comments on her research about attitudes toward women’s body hair come about midway through the program, which originally aired last week.
In a survey she conducted, Basow found that a woman who does not shave her body hair is seen as “less friendly, less relaxed, more aggressive, more dominant and assertive, more unsociable, more independent, than when she had no hair that was visible,” she tells program host Polly De Blank. The increasing overlap of social roles for women and men has led to their bodies serving as “the site for gender differences,” says Basow, who notes that upper class women in the Roman empire used hot tar and sharpened seashells to remove their body hair.
The program will be available on the web site through next Monday evening.
A Jan. 23 article in The Guardian of London, England, noted that Basow’s study indicated that “the majority of the women who did not shave their legs identified as ‘very strong feminists and/or as not exclusively heterosexual,’ and the major reason they did not shave was for political reasons. However, 81% of the women surveyed shaved their legs and/or underarms on a regular basis. They identified strongly with their own heterosexuality, suggesting that the hairless norm for women serves to exaggerate the differences between men and women. ‘The implication of the hairless norm,’ she writes, ‘is that women’s bodies are not attractive when natural and must be modified.”
Allure magazine also cited Basow’s research on women’s body hair last August. The brief article focused on a study with Joanna Willis ‘99, now a Lafayette alumna, published last year in Psychological Reports. “We found that a woman with visible body hair was seen more negatively than the same woman without visible body hair, regardless of her reasons for not shaving,” says Basow.
Basow shared her expertise on CityTV of Toronto, Ontario, for a “SexTV” program on body hair that aired March 3, 2001.
American Psychological Association recently named Basow a fellow in Division 44, Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Issues. Basow already is a fellow in two other APA divisions: Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, since 2000, and Society for the Psychology of Women, since 1993, for which she serves as secretary.
Basow collaborated with psychology major Kim Rubenfeld ’03 on “‘Troubles talk’: Effects of gender and gender typing,” published this year in Sex Roles. The article is based on independent research that Rubenfeld conducted last year under Basow’s guidance. Last March, Rubenfeld presented findings from the project to the Eastern Psychological Association Conference in Boston.
Basow will speak at the 2003 Northeast Regional Workshop on Gender Issues in the Sciences held June 11-13 by Colby College’s Forum for Women in Science in Waterville, Maine. The workshop will address issues facing female science faculty in higher education.
At the American Psychological Association conference held last August in Chicago, Basow was facilitator and co-coordinator of “Teaching the Psychology of Women,” a four-hour workshop with three presentations on how to incorporate more diversity into a course on the psychology of women or gender. Also at the conference, Basow participated on a panel discussing “Career Strategies for Women in Academe.”