The Right to Braid Hair

Shira Rawlinson reports on a victory for constitutional rights:

http://ij.org/utah-hairbraiding-release-8-9-2012

Why is the process of becoming a barber, hairdresser, or manicurist so complicated, anyway? Well...it seems that, back in the bad old days when city dwellers just dumped their chamberpots out the upstairs bedroom windows, Europeans found it necessary to wear some sort of hat or head cover at all times. (Men were supposed to take off their presumably nasty hats when they came indoors; etiquette conceded women the right to conceal their long unwashed hair under cloth bonnets, to which they added extra hats, hoods, or parasols when they went outdoors.) Even after plumbing was invented, into the early twentieth century, a feeling persisted that people weren't quite dressed without a hat.

So even our recent ancestors kept their sweaty scalps covered most of the time, and scalp fungus infections were as widespread as foot fungus infections still are among people who wear shoes and socks most of the time. Washing that sweaty, stinky, moldy hair was a major chore, which doctors warned people never to do more than once a week. Many Euro-Americans didn't even take a bath every week. Lice and flea infestations were also commonplace. The fact that Grandma was alive meant that she was resistant to tuberculosis, to which everybody up into the 1940s was exposed, so her fears of catching that disease in a hairdressing shop were unrealistic...but she did have reasons to be concerned about picking up other unpleasant things. If Grandma had her hair bobbed in the 1920s, that was truly a daring adventure.

Whew. Pause to give thanks for running water, and the cultural triumph of the Native American idea of bathing every day. Scalp fungus infections are rare these days. Few Americans have ever seen the species of flea that can actually live on human blood. The hazards of going to a professional hair stylist are practically limited to cold and flu virus, bad haircuts, and boredom.

Result: we now have lots of professional hair stylists. Anybody can learn to cut, curl, braid, or even dye hair. Frugal people do these things at home, but the problem on college campuses is limiting the number of students who can earn pocket money by playing with their friends' hair. And we as a nation have addressed this problem by continuing to treat hair care as if it were practically a medical specialty--as if the need to control infectious diseases were still so urgent that hairdressers needed a one-year or even two-year trade school course just to learn how to protect themselves from lice, fleas, and scalp fungus.

Larry Elder has been saying for a long time that one way to boost the local economies of poor communities, help students stay in college, etc., would be to reduce the economic pressure on young people who want to go into the hair care industry. It's good to see that at least braiding, a hair care specialty that was overlooked when the overregulation of hair care was going on, has been opened up to these young people. It would be pleasant to see this trend continue.