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    Women's body hair (5) removal is strongly normative across numerous cultural contexts today. Survey research indicates that the practice is currently prevalent in North America (Basow, 1991) and Australia (Tiggemann & Kenyon, 1998). However, accounts of women's hair removal from such diverse regions as Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the Tobriand Islands; Uganda; South America; and Turkey (Cooper, 1971) show it to be neither a modern nor a purely Western invention. Taken together, the long history and the current, documented prevalence of women's body depilation suggest it to be of social significance. Moreover, there is strong evidence of a widespread symbolic association between body hair--or its absence--and ideal gender: to have a hairy body is a sign of masculinity; to have a hairless one, a sign of femininity (6) (Basow, 1991; Basow & Braman, 1998; Cooper, 1971; Ferrante, 1988; Firth, 1973; Greer, 1970; Hope, 1982; Simpson, 1986; Synnott, 1993; Tiggemann & Kenyon, 1998; Toerien & Wilkinson, 2003, 2004). Indeed, the depiction of the female body as depilated, with "smooth unwrinkled ... skin" (Tiggemann & Kenyon, 1998, p. 873), is part of the current, dominant, mass media image of ideal femininity (Whelehan, 2000).

Yet hairlessness is not the inevitable state of the female body; to be hairless typically requires work (Synnott, 1993). Thus, women's practices of depilation--the work required to produce themselves as hairless--may be understood as one means of transforming the body such that it more closely resembles the feminine ideal. As such, hair removal may act as a "structuring device ... reflect[ing] larger cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity, of sex roles, and of changes in social-sexual status" (Ferrante, 1988, p. 220). This article, in which we highlight the normative status of hair removal in a cultural context not researched before--the UK--presents the results of an investigation of the work of hair removal; we argue that this is a significant facet of the production of a socially acceptable femininity.