Women have been property throughout history more often than we like to think.
Interestingly enough, the women around here that don’t cut their hair (Pentecostals, I believe) dress pretty…thoroughly.
Maybe they’re just being careful.
-Joe
If you read the Public Domain text Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, there is a whole chapter on hair length as a “mania” over time. The author speaks at length about how hair length among men seemed to continually go up and down, how beards and mustaches come and go, etc. In many of the cases it’s a matter of an Authority exerting control over people by dictating how they should appear - either a religious or a secular authority.
There is evidence that the current “men wear short hair” trend got its roots with the urbanization that slowly started in the mid-1800’s, but the reasons for this seem to vary greatly depending upon the source. I’ve read that it’s due to a specific order by Queen Victoria that court members must have short hair, that it was due to easier wearing of hats, that it was due to being easier to keep clean in the sooty inner city, etc. I did some research into this a while back and kept ending up in a rabbits warren of conflicting citations, and gave up on it.
Hair and beard styles are also an easy emblem to adopt as a symbol of defiance, or a badge to identify your particular group, which helps muddy the water considerably also. By the time you factor that in with capricious norms imposed by authority or popular fashion, attempting to make coherent sense out of this subject is hopeless.
You can go back longer than that; if you look at the wall paintings from Egyptian tombs, you see the women are shown with long hair. The men’s hair is shorter.
My guess - long hair is pretty, and women are more interested in being pretty than men.
But the OP’s point, is why did it come to be considered effeminate, until about 1965? Conservative Christian sects were, and usually still are, also against long male hair, but that too seems to be just a reflection of that prevailing attitude.
My guess is that Jesus didn’t actually have long hair. The quotation from Paul above suggests that long hair wasn’t in fashion in Judea at the time, so if Jesus did have long hair this would have probably been noteworthy enough to be known and mentioned by some of the Bible authors. But does the Bible say he had long hair? (Maybe it does – I’m certainly no Bible scholar – but I can’t remember hearing such a verse.)
I’m guessing the long-haired Jesus (like Jesus being portrayed with Northern European features) was something that originated with painters in the Middle Ages.
Certainly, hairstyles have varied considerably through history. But has there ever been a time when the customary female hairstyle was shorter than the customary male hairstyle of the same time?
Something else I thought of, though I may be off base. Time was when access to running water was less prevalent, and that was later than you might think. Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman wrote in his memoir about growing up with several siblings, and all the kids having to be washed in one fill of bath water. Males usually seem to be more susceptible to body odor, especially given the stricter division of labor and activity that used to prevail. So on men, long hair would be another place to gather dirt and odors, and hence more objectionable.
According to this site, there have been times and places where men wore their hair longer than women:
This one doesn’t specify, but I believe they are referring to men:
Here’s it debatable whether men’s or women’s hair was longer:
Here’s men and women with equally long hair:
Big, elaborate wigs for both men and women:
As I understand it, Jewish women shave their heads and wear wigs made of somebody else’s hair (?!) while the men grow their hair and beards fairly long, with long ringlets.
Here’s an interesting site looking at what the Bible says about men having long hair. It gives cites both for and against men having long hair.