The extent to which long hair on men was something that was simply not done at one point in time (from sometime in the early 20th century until it started to come into fashion in the 1960s) and the social difficulties that the first men who decided to grow their hair out in the 60s faced until society largely accepted the trend of long hair on men in the 70s, is remarkable. What could have caused this attitude held by past generations toward something as innocent as hair?
The factors that may have contributed to this prejudice could be multiple: the militarization of countless men during World War I and then World War II would have been one, owing to the military's propensity for requiring short hair. Other factors could have included a reaction by many men who had grown up in the late 19th and early 20th century to their mothers' tendency to keep them in in their early years of life in long corkscrew curls and Fauntleroy suits, who had hated this and had subsequently decided that no such styles would be imposed on their own sons.
One other factor just might have been that starting in the 1920s, women started bobbing their hair; between then and the late 1960s, there were periods when fashionable women's hairstyles were quite short and many women wore their hair in these fashionable styles, so it might just have been that, in those days, when gender roles were still clearly defined and when people had not yet developed the idea of respect for different ways of expressing one's gender, men may have insisted on short hair in part in order to make sure it was "always" shorter than a woman's.
In the 1960s, people who disapproved of men who had embraced the new trend of long hair, gave reasons such as these for their disapproval:
- They simply didn't like that men with long hair were doing something different from societal conventions.
- They found these men unkempt or in contravention of established grooming standards.
- They associated them with hippies (whose attitudes and lifestyles they disapproved of).
- Some of those who supported the Vietnam War associated long hair with pacifism.
