IN FRANCE DURING THE 1920s, FASHION WAS A HIGHLY CHARGED ISSUE. In 1925, an article in L'oeuvre jocularly described how the fashion of short hair had completely overturned life in a small French village. After the first woman in the village cut her hair, accompanied by" tears and grinding of teeth" on the part of her family, the fashion had quickly become" epidemic: from house to house, it took its victims." A gardener swore he would lock up his daughter until her hair grew back; a husband believed that his wife had dishonored him. A scandalized cure decided to preach a sermon about it, but" unfortunately he had chosen the wrong day, since it was the feast of Jeanne d'Arc." As he began to condemn bobbed hair as indecent and unchristian," the most impudent young ladies of the parish pointed insolently at the statue of the liberator."'By claiming the bobbed-cutJoan of Arc as their mascot, these young women grounded their quest for" liberation" in the rich, tangled mainstream of French history. They appealed to the ambivalent yet strongly traditional image of Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Virgin), at once patriotic, fervently Christian, and sexually ambiguous. The fashion among young women for short, bobbed hair created enormous tensions within the French family. Throughout the decade, newspapers recorded lurid tales, including one husband in the provinces who sequestered his wife for bobbing her hair and another father who reportedly killed his daughter for the