by guest blogger, Renee Clark
www.raneesclark.com
www.raneesclark.com
In the late 1940s, one would imagine women had access to
many of the conveniences for personal care that we have today, right? One
glance at the popular rolled hairstyles that women did at home, without the use
of a maid, makes one assume things had come a long way since the Regency and
Victorian periods.
That’s what I thought too, until I sat down to fact check
for my historical novel, Beneath the
Bellemont Sky, which takes place on a Wyoming farm in 1946-47. Radios were
common in nearly every household by then and we were on the cusp of many people
owning a TV. Hairspray seems like a given, right?
It wasn’t. The technology we’ve come to associate with
aerosol sprays we use now was perfected for the use of insecticides during
World War II, and using it on the sticky solutions that set hair styles didn’t
become widespread until the 1950s. When the main character of Beneath the Bellemont Sky, Vera, fixes
her hair for a fall festival, she has to rely on curlers and good luck for
keeping her hair in place. Being thrust into the work place during World War II
and beauty supply shortages, women’s hairstyles during the 1940s were
utilitarian, and as the decade wore on, soft, brushed out curls became the
go-to styles.
Setting up the perfect hairstyle wasn’t the only thing that
took much more thought than we give it today. While writing the second section
of the book, I assumed that it would be just slightly more complicated than it
is in modern times for Eleanore, one of Vera’s friends, to find out that she
was pregnant. After all, the forties weren’t that long ago! A few hours of research later, I realized it was
much more complicated than even a trip to the doctor. Did you know that the
at-home pregnancy tests we use today weren’t even developed until the 1970s? In
the book, Eleanore has to rely on knowing her body as she suspects her
condition. At that time, one of the only known ways to test if a woman was
pregnant was to inject a sample of her hormones into a mouse and wait for a few
days to see if it went into “heat.” The tests were long and expensive, and not
something Eleanore would likely have access to or even choose to do.
You can find out more about Raneé S. Clark and her new book, Beneath the Bellemont Sky at www.raneesclark.com
Sources
“A Thin Blue Line: The History of the Pregnancy Test Kit,”
National Institutes of Health, Office of History, history.nih.gov
Encyclopedia of Hair:
A Cultural History by Victoria Sherrow, pages 183-184
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