[blaireaug]

Gilette. During WW2, they didn't have anyone to sell their products to, so they started marketing shaving to women. Before this, a woman shaving was akin to claiming yourself to be a prostitute. Now, it's a cultural norm for women to shave...all because of manufactured desire.

[eli]

This sounds apocryphal. Women were shaving their armpits in the 1920s.

[blaireaug]

Sorry, WW1. I get those two mixed up all the time. And yeah, actually, it may be apocryphal, but here's why I believe it to be true.

[1]http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-wom...

"The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair."

[2]http://history.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/kirste...

"In July of 1915, the first Gillette razor for women came on the market. But where Gillette had responded to a clear void in the men’s hair removal market, he now faced the dilemma of promoting to a market that did not yet exist. Hence Gillette was responsible for introducing to American women the revolutionary concept of shaving."

[3]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1982....

[alexsb92]

Though not shaving, women and men had been removing bodily hair with a variety of creams/razors way before WW1.