3. Women Were Discouraged From Having Body Hair
Just like today, beauty standards pressured women to remove all of their body hair. Women would puck with tweezers, but they also used dried cat waste to scrub off hair from the skin. A book from the 11th Century called De Ornatu Mulierum says as follows; “In order permanently to remove hair. Take ants’ eggs, red orpiment, and gum of ivy, mix with vinegar, and rub the areas.” Priests from the Church were enraged by the vanity of all of this, saying that hair removal meant to entice men was a sin. However, most paintings from the time showed naked women without any body hair at all, even in her private areas. Just like today, this must have only been available to certain women, because stories from the time like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, describe women’s pubic hair.