Beauty Parlors vs. Barber Shops

Compared to barber shops that have been around since ancient Greece, women's salons and beauty parlors are relatively new inventions. Cristen and Caroline look at the history of each, as well as the gender and racial politics woven into the places we get our hair cut.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline and Caroline. We've talked about hair a
number of times on Stuff Mom Never Told You, covering
things like the significance of women's hair and length, what

(00:26):
happens when women cut their hair short and they kind
of associations with that. We talked about graying hair, and
now we're going to look at the places that we
often go to get our hair cut, because when you
look into beauty parlors and barber shops or whatever you
want to call your hair cuttery, there are so many

(00:52):
aspects of gender, culture, ethnicity, a lot of stuff tied
up in these places. Yeah, this reading about this topic
actually got me thinking about where I have gotten my
hair cut the past several years, various different salons, and
it's usually been all women the salon I go to.

(01:12):
Now there are a couple of men um, but it's
always been mostly white as well. Yeah. I have a
feeling that if most listeners think about where they go
get their haircut, if their guy, they're probably going to
a place with a lot of other men. Uh, a
lot of times we go to get our hair cut
at places filled with people who look a lot like us.

(01:33):
I think that's the simplest way to put it, which
is a little weird when you think about it, because
it's hair. It's just human hair, So why do we
need these kinds of segregated spaces. But before we get
into hair salons, beauty parlors, barber shops today, let's go

(01:54):
as we often do back in history because, not surprisingly,
because he Wan's have always had these pesky heads of hair,
We've always wanted and had people to cut our hair
fix our hair may look nice, well, that is if
you're rich. Right in ancient room, going back to the

(02:14):
days of ancient Roman hair, hair dressing was performed by
slaves and former slaves, and so this kind of ties
into hair dressing historically being seen as a lower status
form of labor. Yeah, this is also something that's referred
to as body work. If you go to hair salon,
if you go get a manicure, pedicure, if you go

(02:36):
get a massage. It's these kinds of services focused on
working on our bodies. And an ancient Rome though that
kind of bodywork, the hair dressing that happened was no
simple task because it was almost like hair sewing because
they use needles and thread to stitch together those intricate
designs that you'll see in artwork or in sculpture. And

(03:00):
this was discovered actually by a hairdresser turned academic, Janet Stevens,
who wrote this groundbreaking paper called Ancient Roman Hairdressing on
Hairpins and Needles, and it sent shock waves through academia
because she, in her spare time, studied all of these

(03:23):
primary sources, looking at Roman women's hair and figuring out
what kind of tools they had at the time. And
I don't want to go too much off into this tanship,
but it was fascinating to see how they literally wove
women's hair together. Yeah, and the study included pictures of
hair dummies, you know, just heads with with hair for

(03:44):
for styling purposes, you know, using these dummies to illustrate
how one would go about creating these Roman hairstyles, which
was cool and kind of creepy all at the same
time because not all of the hair dummies had eyes. Yeah,
some of the capitated dummy heads were eyelis. But thankfully,

(04:06):
once you looked at the intricate braiding that was done
the weaving distracted from the potentially terrifying faces. Um. But
since ancient times, like in Rome, this is also verified
in ancient Greece, and even if you look into biblical
texts for instance, hair has long been an integral part

(04:26):
of gender performance, as we've touched on in those other
hair podcasts. For instance, men's long hair for a long
time symbolized strength, political power, and youth, which is interesting
because today most dudes of short hair, right, I mean
think about Samson. And for women, hair denotes fertility and sexuality.

(04:46):
But one of the sources we were reading was talking
about how basically women had a very short period of
even being able to display this I don't fertile sexy hair.
You know, it was like between the time of growing
up and being young girl to write, before you got married,
and then it was that hair went right back up
because you were somebody's missus. Yeah. I mean for men

(05:08):
and women alike, the way that we wear our hair
has been so scripted for so long. Um. But if
you move over to West Africa, for instance, this is
really interesting. The hairdresser's roles in a lot of society's
has long been praised because there are beliefs, for instance,
about people's spirits being embodied in their hair, as well

(05:30):
as traditions of braiding and hair design that symbolize milestones
and people's lives like coming of age, marriage, And I
mean you mentioned Caroline that in ancient room, ancient Greece,
women had that brief window of time, and yet the
person who was fixing all the hair was looked down upon.
But if you look more into African cultures, they seemed

(05:54):
to take more pride in the artistry of hair. And
then if you fast forward to the eighteenth and nineteenth
century in the United States, you see those cultures colliding.
But moving from looking at women's hair and sexy hair
to men's sexy hair. Let's talk about beards for a moment.

(06:16):
Where do we get the word barber? It comes from
the Latin word for beard, and barber shops were common
in Greece around four b C and in Rome in
two b C. And fun tidbit about the barber pole.
The red and white pole symbolizes blood letting and bandages
because barbers were employed for periodic ritual blood letting after

(06:38):
a papal decree forbade clergy and monks from blood letting
and so you know, you you no big deal, you'd
just be a barber surgeon. Yeah, and I'm sure that
guys going to the barber today what I would love
to think about blood letting. That's what That's what this
this pole means. Okay, I'm not nervous at all about
the shave. I'm about to get um. But but that
is interesting though to note that barber shops do predate

(07:01):
the beauty shop. Probably the women's hair would be done
at home. Um. And a lot of this also is
coming from the paper called Working on Hair by Helene M.
Lawson and Losson notes that by four hundred London barbers
formed the London Company of Barber's Guild, and even by

(07:23):
this point the social function of the barber was as
a news deliverer and an advisor, similar to how we
think of the function of the beauty shop the hair
salon today, where there is often lots of exchange of news, gossip,
advice giving, et cetera. But it started out though, with

(07:46):
the barber. Yeah. And and you know all this talk
about barber meaning beard and this being a man's space,
it's not that there weren't women there there were women
barber's even way back then, but they were by no
means the majority, and they were by no means the boss. Yeah,
they would not have been owning the barber shop. Um
But we should note too that Gillette's mass production of

(08:09):
a safety razor in nineteen oh three did threaten barber
shop business. But industry wide, men were considered the real
minds and the scientific innovators when it came from the
expansion of the barbershop into the beauty shop and just
hairstyling as a whole, and they were often called beauty

(08:29):
culturalists side note. And they would unionize's kind of like
those London barbers did in four hundred, But those unions
were led mostly by men, and often when they were
talked about in trade publications and in the media, it
was usually dudes cutting hair who gotten most of the attention.

(08:50):
And it was these um men in these beauty culturalist
unions who did around the first half of the twentieth
century seek to regulate the industry. Basically, they wanted to
ensure that men, whether they were styling women's hair or
men's hair, were earning a bread winter wage. That was
the objective, and so during the first half of the

(09:11):
twentieth century, they wanted to make sure that they regulated
it and regulated the industry, I should say, in such
a way that it became a respected profession, kind of
tidied up a bit so that there were rules and
regulations as far as hours go, safety, you know, all
the stuff that we think of as positives. That's good, right,
there should be rules and regulations for safety. But around

(09:32):
this time, what that basically did was kind of screwed
over the smaller female run hair care businesses. And I
say hair care businesses, but I mean that could be
anything from something run on a woman's front porch to
a factory latrine basically, and so um, these unions, these

(09:53):
men and these unions were essentially trying to distance the
work from quote unquote women's work and exclude another quote
irregular practitioners. Oh no, Well, perhaps they were feeling like
the previously male dominated industry was being infiltrated by women

(10:15):
all of a sudden. Because women's hairdressing really started out
as an at home operation. It was almost like a
cottage industry that some women would have and in the
late nineteenth in early twentieth century, women were converting their kitchens,
bathrooms and porches into beauty parlors, which really fostered some

(10:35):
entrepreneurialism among domestic workers and farm girls. This was an
opportunity for women who didn't have a lot of means
to start their own businesses and to really make something
of themselves. Um And at the turn of the century
there were only a few salons that did cater to women.
It's still the days of the barbershop, and mostly was

(10:57):
wealthy women who would leave the house to go get
their hair done, although we should note that hair dressing
services rarely included cutting, because women tended to wear their
hair long. You would go there instead to just get
it washed and detangled, oiled, et cetera. All that fancy
stuff put up into a fancy pretzel looking thing. Yes,

(11:19):
pretzel hair done. Yes. But the thing is, though people
thought that it would be a fad, women going to
get their hair done, men going to barbershops. Okay, sure,
But at the beginning of the twentieth century, oh my goodness, no,
why would why would women do that? But then things

(11:40):
really changed within the industry, and this again might have
prompted more of the union unionization efforts that were going
on led by male hairdressers or barbers because with the
invention of the bob haircut and the permanent wave, all
of a sudden, women were going to salons, they were

(12:01):
going to barbershops, they were going any place they could
to get their hair done. Yeah. It's funny to read
accounts from that time of men who were like pouting,
you know, because they couldn't get a seat in the
barbershop because all these all of these randy women were
in there getting their hair cut off. This is pre
World War One, and um, barbershops were struggling to keep

(12:21):
up with all of this demand. And it was great
because it was good for business, but it was weird
because it was women. Yeah. One academic describes it as
the struggle over the nature of public space and the
increasing desire among women to have their own homeless social space,
which contributed to the dramatic growth of the women's hairdressing industry.

(12:42):
UM and speaking though again of men in the in
the industry, it was German hairdresser Charles Nessler who was
hailed as the inventor of the permanent wave machine, whom
Time magazine called a revolutionist who transformed women's way of
life because with the permanent wave, you go in, you
get your hair waved and done. You don't have to

(13:03):
think about fixing your hair painstaking late every day and
actually is a bit of a time saver um. But
like you said, Caroline, some men were pretty disgruntled about
women arriving at the barbershops sometimes get their hair bobbed.
There was a nineteen verse actually that was published in

(13:24):
the New Zealand Freelance, so this was not just in
the United States. This from the New Zealand Freelance and
it went says, the poor Harry Bachelor bobber b o
b b R shop is the right word. Now I
can't get shaved. I'm in despair. There's a girl and
every bobber's chair. How terrible. Yeah, well, I mean it
was obviously the popularity was getting out of control. I mean,

(13:47):
in n there were five thousand beauty shops registered, not barbershops,
but beauty shops. It wasn't a huge thing, and this
is in the US, but by that had skyrocketed to
forty thousand. So I mean those chain aging times. The
new technology of having the permanent along with the new
style of the bob I mean women were going in droves. Yeah,

(14:09):
And there was also a fad of bleached blonde hair,
which we might not think about as happening before World
War One. We think of the blonde bombshell is more
of a World War two era kind of lady. But
that was happening at the same time, which also fed
that beauty shop industry. But in nineteen thirty two, the

(14:31):
debut of the at home perm meant that less wealthy
women could also experiment with styling. So the bobbing and
the waving and the bleaching, uh, it was happening, yes,
a lot at these barbershops, at new salons, but it
was still happening at home. There was still a big
grassroots aspect to hairdressing. Yeah, And so by the end

(14:55):
of World War One, hair dressing was seen as a
respectable middle class woman's occupy. Patient and the beauty industry
was sustained during the Great Depression as well, thanks to
products that could only be purchased in salons, which in
the year I'm just gonna go ahead and say it's infuriating.
I'm glad that these salons made it through the Great
Depression and everything, but I can't tell you how annoying

(15:16):
it is to have to go to a salon to
buy my shampoo. I mean, okay, like I don't buy
all my shampoo to salon. I'm not like a total
press like just you know, well, it's just expensive, but
it's well, it's expensive, and I you know, would like
to be able to get it at the grocery store.
But hey, that's I mean, that's part of why, though
the hair dressing industry is as robust as it is today,

(15:37):
they suckered us in Carolina, I know, and now we're
just stuck. Well, so if you look at the amount
of women going to beauty shops, in thirty seven point
five per cent of women went to beauty shops. That
that increased in nineteen fifty three to fifty two percent.
That's not that long of a time. Yeah, it went

(15:58):
up really quickly. But there's something about this history of
hairdressing in the United States that we have to point out,
and that is that what we've talked about so far
is really just about white men and women. And you
mentioned at the top of the podcast, Caroline that a
lot of the places that you go, you've noticed it's

(16:20):
you know, it's you, it's other women and generally other
white women, and I think that's pretty common, same for me,
because it's something that we might not think about that often.
But not only are beauty shops hair salons highly gendered spaces,
they're also highly segregated spaces. And that's even in But

(16:45):
we have to go back and and way back. We
have to talk about some of the uglier history in
the United States that leads us up to today and
how also the black beauty shops are going to become
these real powerhouses for or the civil rights movement um.
But touching quickly on the importance of hair in African society,

(17:07):
because we talked about how in ancient Grease, ancient Rome,
hair dressing was always considered this lower status occupation. It
was something that the slaves did. But if you go
to someplace like West Africa, the hairdresser's role in many
societies has long been a really honored one because of
beliefs about people's spirits being embodied in their hair, or

(17:31):
simply because of time honored traditions dealing with a braiding
and hair design that represent milestones in people's lives. And
I think those different attitudes towards hair came with people
from West Africa when they came to America as slaves,
and slave owners, as we look back, would attempt to
humiliate and too humanize their slaves by shaving their heads

(17:54):
and referring to their hair and animalistic descriptions, calling them
things like wool. Hair was a symbol of pride, strength
and invincibility, and often it would suffer. Often the hair
would be removed. Yeah. Julie A. Will It talks about
this in her book Permanent Waves, The Making of the
American Beauty Shop, and she mentions how female slaves working

(18:17):
in the fields might wrap and thread their hair with
cotton and cover it with a bandana. Not unlike the
effect of sitting under a dryer. There was still that
kind of hairstyling that was going on, and slaves also
commonly served as slave owners, barbers, and hairdressers, harkening back

(18:37):
to those ancient room and days where it's the slave's
job to make the master presentable, which is when you
consider how loaded the slaves hair was to the master's
where it would be cut as punishment, where people would
often be ridiculed for having non white hair. It's a

(19:01):
it's a strange relationship when you start to think about that, Yeah,
I mean speaking of strange and evolving relationships. Up until
about the eighteen twenties, black men were the prominent hairdressers
for women, but that quickly changed when social attitude started
changing toward not only black men, but the views of

(19:23):
black men interacting with white women, and suddenly that was
seen as unsafe. It was not a good idea, and
so those racist fears ended up leading to black men
being barred from providing that service. Yeah. In Atlanta, actually, uh,
they passed a city ordinance that white women couldn't go
to a blackmail barber because of those racist fears. And

(19:47):
even after the Civil War when we have the slaves
who were freed moving up north, they were often still
hairdressers too wealthier white clientele, which, again, these were arrangements
that uncomfortably hearkened back to that indentured domestic work, and
a similar color line was drawn with black barbers as well.

(20:11):
It's like they're doing similar jobs that they were doing
back in the days when they were enslaved. And gradually
the beauty industry really segregated itself, and by the nineteen
twenties and thirties, it was already rare to see an
African American woman hairdressing a white woman. Yeah, and it's
also interesting. You know, we talked about unions a little

(20:33):
bit ago and how they were trying to basically root
out women and quote unquote irregular practitioners in this beauty industry.
And in the mid twentieth century, the industry was looking
to expand, and that's when lines started to get blurred,
and there is that rise of more men and women
getting their hair cut and the same places those color

(20:55):
lines were pretty deep, I think, um And and also
embedded with that is the good hair versus bad hair
complex that also serves to further segregate white salons versus
black salons, because there have even been court cases where

(21:16):
a white person working into the salon will refuse to
cut a black woman's hair because she says she just
doesn't know how to cut black hair. In quotes um
And Jennifer Scanlon, who did some research on the representation
of beauty parlors in film, says, quote the beauty parlor
plays a role in demarkeating difference, in imposing disciplinary practices

(21:38):
that enforce racism through beauty standards. Bell Hooks and others, however,
remember the beauty parlor not as a discipline whiteness, but
as an important ritual and an instruction in womanhood. And
another thing that Hooks was saying about those trips to
the salon, those ritualized trips to the salon, is that,
you know, even though we shouldn't fall prey to a

(22:00):
the male gaze or be you know, what society tells
us we should look like black or white. It is
sort of a part of womanhood about growing up and
not being able to escape those images and not being
able to or necessarily even wanting to escape the desire
to feel pretty. But then when you add on to that, though,

(22:23):
considering this judgment purely based on the texture of your hair,
how that must add another layer of complexity though to
that instruction in quote unquote womanhood and what might be
acceptable womanhood, because it's such a lie really that there

(22:45):
is good hair versus bad hair. This is something that
a constancy On Russell points out in a paper she
wrote for the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal in two
tho eight. She says, actually, black hair can be curly, wavy, long, short, straight, xtured, fine, thick, medium, course,
oily dry, or combination of characteristics. Generally, they're fifteen to

(23:07):
twenty different types of hair on black women, with a
number of different types on one head. There is no
standard type of black hair. And she sided studies talking
about how there's typically more differences within a group than
across groups, and so going to a salon and being told, oh,
we don't do that type of hair is actually a
bunch of bull honky. But so kind of amidst all

(23:31):
of these um racist attitudes and the deep lines of
segregation drawn between white hair salons and beauty parlors and
black hair salons and beauty parlors, you have women who
were striking out on their own with the support of
the black salons behind them. Yeah, the black beauty industry

(23:52):
really starts out in the nineteen tens as a door
to door cottage industry, not unlike how hair dressing in
general really started out as a cottage industry in women's bathrooms,
on their front porches, in their kitchens. Um. And there
are two names that we have to call out, Madam C. J.
Walker and Annie Turnbow. Malone and Walker built up this

(24:16):
beauty industry after working for eighteen years as a laundress
and a widowed single mother, and she developed something called
the Walker hair Care System and became one of the
most successful women, not Black women, just women in general
in the United States in the early nineteen hundreds. Yeah,
she employed two thousand to ten thousand Walker agents and

(24:38):
started up Walker schools for training. Um. And it's interesting
to read about the product she created because they really
had mass appeal. This wasn't just a thing that was
just for black women. This was something that anybody would
who was looking for cleaner, healthier hair was drawn to
and so becoming a beauty cultural culturalist excuse me alongside

(25:02):
Madam C. J. Walker. It was a significant opportunity for
Black women who otherwise found few jobs outside of domestic work. Yeah,
in nineteen thirty, just to put it in some perspective,
clerical and sales jobs accounted for one third of all
white women's employment and only one percent of African American

(25:23):
women's paid labor. So Walker really did open up a
lot of valuable opportunities. Although she is sometimes criticized in
her hair care system is criticized for it being for
emphasizing straight hair and maybe emulating more of what we
would consider Euro or Caucasian hair. But you can't deny

(25:46):
that she was very much committed to civil rights as well, right, Yeah,
she was actually an organizer after the St. Louis race
Riot of nineteen seventeen, h Walker and some of her
agents alvanized ten thousand Black New Yorkers in the Negro
Silent Protests parade, petitioning the White House to make lynching

(26:06):
and mob violence a crime. And this is a theme
that we will get into here in a minute, that
we see throughout black beauty parlors. Yeah, and we just
have to quickly mention two Walker's protege, Annie Turnbow Malone,
whose beauty gospel was also sort of what's called, by
one academic, a racial culture. She really focused on promoting

(26:32):
clean hair, clean bodies to audiences because it would then
foster better appearance, more business opportunities, higher social standing. What
Turnbow was doing was not just selling a product, but
selling a hand up right away, I mean talk about
politics within appearance. Yeah. Well, and then if we move

(26:55):
into the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties, those
kinds of racial equality politics were absolutely intertwined with the
beauty shop culture. This is something that Tiffany gil who
was an associate professor of History and African Diasporas Studies
at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the

(27:18):
author of the book Beauty Shop Politics, African American Women's
Activism in the Beauty Industry, in which she uncovers this
fascinating relationship between those black owned beauty shops and civil
rights organizing. Yeah, the black owned beauty shops really gave
women the perfect platforms for political activism because they didn't
risk employment in the process. They weren't working for a

(27:42):
white woman as a you know, a domestic servant in
their home. These women were running and working in their
own beauty shops. And in a lot of the sources
that we looked at, you know, it wasn't just in
these um black owned beauty shops. It was in women
run beauty shops as well, and it kind of in
general as far as like, oh, well, we don't have
to be worried about them. You know, they're just women,

(28:05):
or in this case, they're just black women. You know,
what's the danger in letting people gather and talk and so,
you know, having beauty shops be overlooked a sort of
an innocuous gathering space actually allowed a lot of political
and social conversations, crucial social conversations to occur. Yeah, and
especially to occur among those women because another example that

(28:28):
she pointed out was that it wasn't just at a
church that would probably have a male preacher, so you
would then have sort of the male oversight. It was
really important that these women were talking to other women.
And Gil says that the beauty industry was central in
the political lives of black women, and there were also

(28:50):
black beauty organizations like the National Beauty Culturist League and
the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers Associations that lent
even more credibility to the perceptions of black professionals as well.
So even within the community with their roles as civil
rights organizers and the respect that they garnered from that,

(29:10):
and then professionally from a from a trade standpoint, you
have these professional organizations also giving them more credibility, and
it becomes a really important cornerstone of these women's lives
and their career potential. Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting

(29:31):
to to talk about that division as far as gender
and race goes, because I mean, these were spaces for
women that you could get away from men and the
domineering male forces in your life and talk about anything
from the silly stuff in your life to the more
serious and in looking at the divisions between black and
white spaces, black owned beauty shops that allowed black women

(29:54):
to help one another. I mean, I think it was
Gil that talked about how even today, a lot of
black owned beauty shops are still sources of health information
to the community. Yeah, there was an example of one
woman who owns a beauty shop who does a lot
in terms of HIV education, like safe sex kinds of things. Um.

(30:18):
But yeah, it's absolutely still going on today. Although it's
we don't have that much more to say about beauty
shops because the history is already so fraught with so
many issues, and I feel like it's not that much
different today. I feel like it's still very segregated, it's

(30:39):
not very talked about, and we just kind of let
it happen. Um. And there's also socio economically, Uh, this
trend where you're either having unisex chain very inexpensive salons
or barbershops pop up versus is the higher and higher

(31:01):
end salons, right, And I think. I mean, I read
one stat that said that that's been a trend since
the nineteen sixties, that total divergence the low price unisex
chain or the high end expensive salons. And at the
same time you have the humongous, deep, steep decline of
the barbershops. Well, and I wonder then if maybe our

(31:23):
it's we've replaced those racist undertones with classiest undertones, where
it's not so much the focus on keeping black and
white people separate, but more keeping you know, going in
for a high end experience, that kind of thing. That
makes sense. Yeah, And I mean, well, some of the

(31:45):
men interviewed in in some of this research we're talking
about going to barbershops and how you know, they talked
to some men who wished they could still be going
to a barber but that just wasn't a service that
was available to them anymore for some reason or another.
But they didn't want to go to a high end
salon and shell out sixty bucks, nor did they want

(32:07):
to go to the unisex shop in the mall and
and not know the person cutting their hair. And so
I'm just wondering also if the decline barbershops has to
do with cultural norms as far as like, well, you're
a dude, you're not supposed to care about that. Oh yeah,
there's so much masculinity stuff tied up into barbershops, so
we didn't really even have time to go into. In
Helene Lawson's paper working on hair, she spent some time

(32:32):
in barbershops. It was just talking about how the conversations
that you over hear barbershops was so markedly different from
what you hear in salons, and a lot of it
is homophobic or just about men's things. And granted though
she was looking at a very specific geographic area, which
she probably wouldn't hear the same kinds of things if

(32:53):
you were to walk into, say a Manhattan men's salon,
But it's it's fascinating once you really start thinking about
those spaces. Yeah, because I mean, as Lawson was saying,
there's a lot of on both the part of the
client and the hairstylist, there's a lot of kind of
concern for identity management. And so that makes me wonder like,

(33:17):
are we ever going to cross these boundaries? Are the
lines between black, white male female personal spaces going to
be erased when it comes to body work? Yeah, and
that identity management really hit home with me as I
was researching this, because I remembered going to my mom's

(33:37):
salon to get my haircut for the first time, and
it was one of the first places that I really
remember thinking about my appearance and my attractiveness because the
Barbara it was a guy who would cut my hair
and he would always, you know, call me princess. So
you're so pretty, pretty princess, and I loved it. It

(34:00):
was because it was like the first time I had
been like directly praised outside of the hall for being
a cute little girl. And yeah, I was like, whoa,
So that must be weird that I call you princess
all the time. It was a little weird. Should stop,
but you know, I don't mind. But no, I I
really it's like the gendering goes all the way back
that far. Yeah. No, I remember going with my dad

(34:22):
to get his hair cut and it was not he
did not go to a barbershop. He went to a sellon. Um.
But you know, side note, I was very very little.
I was maybe three years old, and I looked out
the window and the hair salon was like slightly elevated
from other buildings and I could see like the exhaust
from some fans somewhere, and I ran out of the

(34:42):
salon screaming that the building was on fire. Small little
things we remember, So you weren't. You weren't thinking about
what a pretty little princess you are. Now I don't
even remember. I think my mom took me to Great Clips,
which was fine, literally, I mean until I was about twelve,
and that was fine, and till I went in and
this woman grabbed my bangs in the middle of my

(35:04):
forehead with one fist and then just chopped across and
so they were all zig zaggy, and I was terrified.
And that's when I started going to a ground up ladies. Hello,
the salon is so so strange to think about this,
and it's gonna I'm gonna and you know what, Caroline,
I'm going to think about all this stuff every time
I go get my haircut now. And well, it actually,
I mean, not to keep rattling on. I mean it

(35:25):
made me think about my mom's hair salon that she
went to because it was run by a man and
people from Atlanta might recognize the name Bob Steele, but
my mom actually went to high school with Bob Steele
and he started a salon in Atlanta, and I think
there's like three or four locations now. And so she
had her haircut by a dude in Atlanta, and then
I did too when I went there. Well, there you go,

(35:50):
summing up nothing. So if we have any hairstylist, barber's
beauty shop attendee, so listening, we want to hear from you.
What do you think about this fraud history of hairdressing
in the United States. Um, there's there's a lot in here.
Let us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com.

(36:11):
You can tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast, and you
can also message us on Facebook. And we have a
couple of letters to share with you when we come
right back from a quick break and now back to
our letters. I have a letter here from Elizabeth in
response to our science podcast. She said, I listened to

(36:33):
the science podcast while doing basic science research in a
lab at a medical university, actually using pipe its and
flasks to do a tissue culture. I'm working towards a
PhD in cell biology, and when people find out where
I go to school, they assume I'm studying to be
a nurse. And when I say no, Their eyes usually
widen and they ask you if I'm in med school.
When I tell them I'm studying to become a scientist,

(36:54):
the usual responses are good for you as a woman, wow,
or I was never good at science. In recent years,
I've been asked about the show The Big Bang Theory occasionally.
All in all, the general public lacks and understanding of
what scientists do, and people are sometimes even intimidated when
they find out that I work in science. One thing
I'd like people to understand is that scientists were probably

(37:17):
not the cool kids in school. Many were and are
nerdy and often feel awkward, if not outright anxious in
social situations. We spend most of our time in the
lab interacting with the same handful of people every day.
Be nice to us, say hello, and please do not
let the mirror mention of science intimidate you. Trust me.
When I'm out on my own time, the last thing
I want to talk about is science, and I'll never

(37:40):
think you're stupid for not being quote unquote good at science.
What I have in scientific ability, I lack in social grace,
and since I've spent much of my adult life being
a science nerd, there are many many things about which
I know next to nothing. Your podcast helps me past
the hours of sometimes monotonous work in the lab, and
thank you. I have a letter here from Ellen. She

(38:03):
is a female software engineer and would like to share
her experiences. She says, I fortunately have not encountered the
programmer archetype too much in my workplace. I agree one
that it's far more prevalent in the startup community. I
work at a large, well known corporation. When I go
to conferences, meetups, and workshops, I am usually either the
only woman there or one of a handful. I do

(38:25):
find that male developers at these events are very interested
in talking to me. Most of the feedback I've gotten
has been positive. These men will say how cool it
is to have a woman participating and getting involved in
the community. I did have an instructor keep commenting on
my looks in one workshop I was in. It was
meant to be complimentary, but all it did was make
me feel even more separate and isolated from the men
in the room. I did work on an all male

(38:47):
team once and felt like I constantly had to prove
that I wasn't going to go to HR every time
someone cracked a joke. The pressure to prove that I
could be one of the guys on that team felt
overwhelming to me, even though it was pressure that mostly
came from myself. I'm extremely fortunate to work on a
team with several female developers. The lead tech on our
team is a woman and is actually seen as one
of the most valuable assets in the company. I've been

(39:09):
very lucky to have such a smart, competent, and assertive
woman as a mentor. Thanks so much for all you do,
and thanks for what you do, Ellen, and thank you
for writing in. We really appreciate everybody sharing their stories
because we want to get the word out about how
many amazing opportunities there are out there for ladies like you. Exactly,

(39:29):
I keep here women in STEM letters coming to us.
Mom Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can
send your emails. You can also message us on Facebook,
tweet us at mom Stuff podcast, and you can also
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Told You. And of course you should head over to
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(39:51):
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