My Hair: Why Women’s Hair Is the Ultimate Symbol of Feminist Resistance

Feminist Resistance: The Moment in the Mirror

There is a moment in many women’s lives when the mirror becomes a reckoning. It is not vanity and it is not fashion. It is a moment in which something internal reaches the surface and demands form. The hand hovers over scissors or clippers. A hairdresser asks, one last time, are you sure? And the answer arrives from somewhere older than language.

This moment rarely occurs in periods of contentment. Women cut their hair in thresholds—after betrayal, in grief, during captivity, on the edge of escape. The act can appear impulsive, even irrational, but it is neither. It is the body speaking when the mouth cannot. It is the psyche declaring a rupture before the conscious mind is ready to articulate it. What looks like style is often a somatic confession: something has ended.

Across history, women have altered their hair in moments of transition, protest, mourning, and defiance. Hair has been used to discipline them, erase them, and domesticate them. In response, women have used it to reclaim themselves. This essay traces two symmetrical movements: hair worn in defiance, and hair cut in defiance. One preserves identity under threat of erasure. The other severs an identity that has become a cage.

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Hair as Identity

Across cultures, hair functions as a visible marker of identity. It signifies age, marital status, sexual availability, religious devotion, tribe, and class. It grows with time and therefore carries memory. It is one of the few parts of the body that can be shaped, concealed, displayed, or removed without physical violence, yet it remains deeply personal. Because of this, hair becomes an interface between the private self and the public world.

This is precisely why power has always tried to control it. Religions regulate hair, schools police it, militaries shave it, prisons remove it, husbands comment on it, employers standardise it, and colonisers cut it. Hair is continuity; it grows forward in time. To alter it is to interrupt a narrative. When femininity is culturally tethered to long, controlled, decorative hair, women’s hair becomes a proxy for obedience. It is meant to be pleasing and legible. It is not meant to be sovereign.

To wear one’s hair in its natural or ancestral form is therefore not neutral. It is a declaration of presence in systems designed to render that presence illegible.

The Kurdish Plait: A Symbol of Resistance

For Kurdish women, the long silken plait is not merely ornamental. It is ancestral continuity worn on the body. In a people without a recognised state, partitioned across hostile borders and subjected to repeated campaigns of erasure, culture itself becomes insurgent. The braid is slow, intimate, intergenerational. It is often woven by mothers and grandmothers. Each plait carries memory, language, and lineage.

In a geopolitical landscape designed to fracture Kurdish identity, to braid the hair in the traditional style is to perform belonging. It is to declare that fragmentation has failed. The braid says, We are still here.

For me personally, this Kurdish symbol of resistance resonated deeply when I watched a video in which a Syrian man held a severed braid of a fallen female resistance fighter up to the camera as a trophy of government oppression.

The hair was long, dark, unmistakable. Kurdish. It dangled from his fingers as he grinned, the way a hunter might lift a carcass for proof of conquest. It was not enough that the woman it belonged to had been killed. She had to be humiliated.

That image created a rupture in me. Until that moment, I had not fully grasped what women’s hair is. Not aesthetically, not culturally, but existentially. I understood, with sudden clarity, that hair is not neutral. It is power. It is story. It is belonging made visible. The braid he held was not decoration. It carried lineage, culture, defiance. It marked her as Kurdish in a world that has spent a century trying to erase Kurds from maps and from memory. To sever it was to declare that even in death she could be stripped of continuity, dignity, and identity. This desecration was not only physical, it was symbolic.

And it was in witnessing that act that this essay began. Because that plait revealed something ancient and universal: women’s hair is a site of meaning, a locus of sovereignty. It can be worn in endurance or cut in refusal. It can be preserved against erasure or severed to mark a threshold. But it is never just hair. It is where our power emerges from our bodies, an eternal protest of what it means to be a woman that tries to possess us.

Colonial Erasure

If hair is identity, then cutting it can be conquest. In colonial boarding schools across North America, Indigenous children were shorn on arrival. Educators described long hair as “part of their very being and religion.” It had to be removed. The cut was not hygienic; it was ideological. The aim was not grooming but erasure.

Hair that carried lineage, cosmology, and belonging had to go. Language followed. Names followed. Ritual followed. Memory followed. The body became the first battlefield. Parents resisted, chiefs burst into classrooms, grandmothers attacked teachers, and children fought back. Hair was not trivial. It was selfhood.

Colonial power understood something modern culture often forgets: to control the body is to colonise the mind. To cut hair is to declare ownership. What was sacred became manageable. What was inherited became replaceable. The scissors were instruments of epistemic violence.

Pretoria High School for Girls

A contemporary echo of this dynamic unfolded in 2016 at Pretoria High School for Girls in South Africa, where Black pupils were disciplined under a grooming code that treated natural African hair as “unacceptable.” Girls were told their afros were “untidy,” “distracting,” or in need of chemical straightening and restraint in order to be presentable. What appeared as neutral regulation revealed itself as racial discipline: a colonial inheritance embedded in institutional life, in which Blackness was required to be softened, flattened, and rendered less visible.

The students responded by walking out of class and standing in the school grounds with placards declaring, “Stop Policing Our Hair” and “My Hair Is Not a Distraction.” Their protest was not about aesthetics but ontology. They were asserting the right to exist in their own bodies without apology. Hair became the battlefield precisely because it is visible and irreducible; it announces identity before speech. They did not change their hair. They changed the terms under which it could be judged.

In each of these cases, resistance is endurance. Hair is worn so that a people, a history, or a self cannot be erased.

Les Femmes Tondue

One of the most striking historical examples of hair being used as a tool of public humiliation was the fate of the femmes tondues in France at the end of the Second World War. As Allied forces liberated the country, thousands of women who were accused—whether justly or not—of horizontal collaboration (intimate or everyday contact with German occupiers) were seized by crowds and had their heads shaved in public as a spectacle of shame.

The practice was not invented in 1944; it drew on older traditions in which shaving a woman’s hair was understood to strip her not only of a culturally “feminine” signifier, but also of dignity and social legitimacy. Across medieval Europe and even earlier, a woman’s hair could be forcibly removed as punishment for perceived sexual transgression or violation of social norms. In France, the epuration sauvage (“wild purge”) that followed the occupation revived this ancient symbol of shame as a collective punishment during a period of national trauma, where suspicion and vengeance often outweighed due process.

These women were paraded through town squares and streets, their bare scalps exposed to jeers, insults, and sometimes worse, as a ritual marking them as traitors to the nation. The image of such women, notably captured on 16 August 1944 in Robert Capa’s photograph of “The Shaved Woman of Chartres,” became emblematic of this violent social purge.

The targeting of women in this way tells us something profound about how hair has been understood in cultures across time: it is not merely personal ornamentation, but a visible signifier of gendered power relations. As a site of both eroticisation and regulation, a woman’s hair could be seized to assert moral condemnation, to re-establish patriarchal social order in moments of upheaval, and to publicly degrade women in a way that mere words could not. The femmes tondues remind us that hair, when taken in violence, becomes a sign not of liberation but of coercion and ideological punishment—a sharp counterpoint to the many ways women have reclaimed their hair as a site of resistance.

From Endurance to Rupture

If wearing hair is resistance through continuity, cutting it is resistance through rupture. One refuses annihilation. The other refuses captivity. The first says, I will not be undone. The second says, I will not be shaped.

Where endurance preserves a threatened story, rupture interrupts a story that has become unlivable.

Frida Kahlo: Cutting the Role

In 1940, Frida Kahlo painted herself seated in a man’s suit, scissors in hand, her long braids scattered across the floor. Above her head, lyrics read: If I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore. The portrait followed her divorce from Diego Rivera.

It is often described as a statement of independence, but it is more precise to read it as a refusal of a role. Kahlo had been loved as an image—adorned, muse-like, aesthetic. She cut the part of herself that had been most easily possessed. She did not cut her hair to become someone else. She cut it to stop being who she had been required to be.

The scissors are not violent in the painting. They are declarative. The image stages a severance between womanhood-as-performance and womanhood-as-sovereignty. It is an act of authorship over the body.

The Psychology of the Cut

When a woman cuts her hair after trauma, the psyche performs a familiar ritual even if she has never been taught it. She is not merely “starting over.” She is marking a death: a belief, a safety, a former self. In abusive relationships, speech is punished, boundaries erode, and desire becomes dangerous. The body becomes the last territory still under personal jurisdiction.

The psyche turns inward and then outward through the body. The scissors become a language. The woman may not yet be able to say I must leave, but her hands already know. This is why the cut so often precedes departure. It is the first unambiguous boundary drawn in a landscape where boundaries have been annihilated. It declares that the previous configuration of self is no longer viable.

Rejecting a Commodified Image of Womanhood

Two of the most culturally legible modern instances of this rupture were enacted by Sinéad O’Connor and Britney Spears, whose shaved heads were interpreted not as philosophical gestures but as pathology. O’Connor’s was, in fact, premeditated. When record executives instructed her to grow her hair and soften her image, she went to a barber and had it entirely removed. The shaved head became a sustained refusal of the feminine aesthetic demanded of women in public life. It announced that her body would not be curated for consumption. Spears’ act, two decades later, unfolded under the violence of spectacle.

Surrounded by paparazzi, trapped in a system that managed her labour, her motherhood, and her appearance, she took the clippers herself and erased the image others owned. Where O’Connor’s cut was defiance against commodification, Spears’ was defiance within captivity. Both acts were framed as breakdowns because women’s refusals are routinely medicalised. Yet each gesture functioned as a threshold: a visible severance from an imposed identity. In cultures where long hair signifies femininity, desirability, and compliance, to remove it is to declare sovereignty over the body’s meaning. These were not cosmetic choices. They were ontological interruptions—women stepping outside the shape they had been made to inhabit.

Ritual Loss — Indigenous Mourning

Among many Indigenous North American nations, including Lakota, Diné (Navajo), Hopi, and Cheyenne communities, long hair is understood as an extension of the self. It carries spirit, memory, and continuity. When a loved one dies, particularly a child, a parent may cut their hair. This is not cosmetic. It is ritual severance.

The cut performs grief. Something has been taken from the world; something is given back. The body enacts loss. The mourner becomes visibly different, acknowledging what words cannot: I am not who I was before this happened. In some traditions, hair grows again only after a formal mourning period. In others, it may remain short for life. The hair becomes a living archive of absence. Much in the same way as a domestic abuse survivor may cut off that oppressive dark period from her very self, grief here is not merely felt. It is embodied. The cut marks an ontological shift.

Sacred Veils and the Architecture of Control

Across many religious traditions, women are instructed to cover their hair. In Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Sikhism, and other faith systems, women’s hair is framed as something that must be concealed in the presence of men. The theological justifications differ, but the structural logic remains remarkably consistent: women’s visibility is regulated at the level of the body.

This is often defended as modesty, reverence, or spiritual discipline, and many women observe these practices freely and sincerely. The issue is not the personal act of devotion. It is the deeper cultural recognition embedded within it. These traditions implicitly agree on one thing: women’s hair is not inert. It carries force. It draws attention. It signifies vitality, sexuality, and presence. It is powerful enough to require containment.

That consensus is revealing.

The covering of hair is frequently framed as protection—of men from distraction, of women from objectification, of society from disorder. Yet this framing quietly relocates responsibility for male perception onto the female body. A woman’s natural state becomes a provocation. Her visibility becomes a problem to be solved. The solution is not to discipline the gaze, but to remove her from it.

In this sense, hair covering becomes a form of pre-emptive regulation. It does not deny that women possess power. It concedes it, and then encloses it. The veil becomes both reverence and restraint. It acknowledges potency while insisting that potency be hidden lest it unlesh forces beyond mortal control.

Public Defiance — Iran

In 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini, women in Iran stepped into the streets and cut their hair on camera. They did not do so privately or apologetically, but in public, before the world. This was not metaphor. It was declaration. The scissors moved through hair in full view of the state, the clerics, the police, and the global audience. What had long been enforced in silence was shattered in spectacle.

The act collapsed centuries of bodily regulation into a visible refusal. It announced that the state did not own women’s bodies, did not define their womanhood, and would not discipline them into silence. Hair fell and power flinched. A practice that had been domesticated into ritual became insurgent again. What had once been framed as obedience was transformed into dissent.

What followed revealed the depth of that rupture. Women across the world—many of whom had never worn a veil, many who had never faced religious policing—began cutting their own hair in solidarity. From Paris to Toronto, from classrooms to kitchens, the gesture was repeated. It crossed borders because it spoke in a language older than politics. It articulated something women everywhere recognised: that the female body is still treated as a site of public jurisdiction, and that autonomy over it remains conditional.

The power of the Iranian act lay in its precision. It did not protest abstractly. It struck at the exact point where control was concentrated. It took a tool of submission and inverted it. In doing so, it revealed a truth that resonates globally: women are still negotiating for ownership of their own appearance, their own visibility, their own flesh.

The scissors became a grammar of revolt. What might once have been read as grooming became insurrection. This was not beauty politics. It was sovereignty enacted in real time.

Hair as Mobility and Captivity: The Bacha Posh

In Afghanistan, some girls are raised as bacha posh, meaning “dressed as a boy.” Their hair is cut short, they are given male names, and they wear boys’ clothes. This transformation grants them something otherwise forbidden: movement. They can walk outside alone, attend school, work, escort female relatives, and exist in public. The scissors grant legs, breath, and range.

But this freedom is temporary. At puberty, when the body begins to announce itself as female, the threshold is crossed again—this time in reverse. The hair is allowed to grow. The boy’s name is relinquished. The girl is returned to femininity and, with it, to enclosure. What had been a life of motion collapses into restriction. The same hair that once enabled passage becomes the marker that ends it. The braid reappears, not as choice but as destiny.

The practice is rooted in patriarchy and is a workaround rather than liberation, yet it reveals a stark truth: hair is a border between captivity and motion. A girl becomes mobile when her hair no longer marks her as female, and she becomes containable again when it does. The cut is not symbolic in the abstract; it is logistical. It reconfigures the body’s relationship to space. In this economy of freedom, hair is not ornament. It is a gate.

Why Power Fixates on Hair

Regimes cut women’s hair. Schools regulate it. Abusers comment on it. Cultures obsess over it. Violators take it as trophies. Hair is visible autonomy. It announces that the body belongs to the person who inhabits it. It is one of the few sites where sovereignty can still be enacted in silence.

To alter it is to say: I am not who you named. I am not what you designed. I am not staying in the shape you made for me.

Whether braided in endurance or cut in rupture, hair becomes a language of resistance. One preserves a threatened story. The other ends a story that has become a prison.

The Quiet Feminist Revolution

Sometimes it looks like a woman in a bathroom at two in the morning, watching strands fall into the sink. Sometimes it looks like a resistance fighter braiding her hair for the symbolism and practicality of defending her people. One is loud, obvious and cathartic. The other is ancient, primal and matriarchal. Both are revolutions.

Hair grows. It remembers. And when it is cut, it is never just hair that falls. It is a story, a role, a captivity, a former self. The body often knows what the mind has not yet dared to say. Sometimes, the first words of freedom are spoken quietly to the self as one’s own fingers are intuitively twisting and twirling, meditating on ones own reflection in a mirror.

References & Further Reading

Iran, Hair Cutting & Resistance

• Death of Mahsa Amini — Wikipedia entry on the 2022 Tehran incident that sparked protests. Death of Mahsa Amini (Wikipedia)
• Gisuborān (hair cutting ritual) — Historical context of hair-cutting gesture and its modern protest significance. Gisuborān (Wikipedia)
• Woman, Life, Freedom movement — Overview of the Iranian protest movement following Mahsa Amini’s death and the Kurdish slogan that spread globally. Woman, Life, Freedom movement (Wikipedia)
• For Women, Life, Freedom: A Participatory AI-Based Social Web Analysis of a Watershed Moment in Iran’s Gender Struggles — Academic analysis of gender discourse after Mahsa Amini’s death (arXiv).

Kurdish Women & Cultural Resistance

• Gulîstan, Land of Roses — Documentary on Kurdish women fighters and their resistance. Gulîstan, Land of Roses (Wikipedia)
• Woman, Life, Freedom (slogan origin) — Kurdish political slogan tied to women’s rights and resistance movements that influenced Iranian protests.

Race, Hair & Cultural Control

(These foundational texts inform your discussion of race, hair policing, and identity.)

• Ayana D. Byrd & Lori L. Tharps — Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (book)
• Frantz Fanon — Black Skin, White Masks (book)
• A. L. Halloun — Beauty Standards and Racial Formations in the English Language (dissertation)

Feminist Theory & Body Politics

(These texts provide the conceptual lens for body, autonomy, and gender.)

• Simone de Beauvoir — The Second Sex
• bell hooks — Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
• Susan Bordo — Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
• Audre Lorde — Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
• Naomi Wolf — The Beauty Myth

Psychology, Trauma & the Body

• Judith Herman — Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence
• Bessel A. van der Kolk — The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Contemporary Cultural Moments

(Examples cited in your essay illustrating hair-cutting as resistance or refusal.)

• TIME Magazine — Britney Spears and Sinéad O’Connor: A Tale of Two Haircuts (article exploring cultural meanings in celebrity haircuts)
• Britney Spears — The Woman in Me (memoir, esp. reflections on autonomy)
• Interviews and statements by Sinéad O’Connor about her choice to shave her head

Thank You for Reading!

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