ABSTRACT
This chapter examines accounts documenting exhibitions of facially bearded women in London after the 1630s in order to consider how those exhibits mark a shift in the culture's treatment of hairy maids its implementing of new strategies to contain, tame, and domesticate the monstrously bearded woman. It analyzes a variety of representations of facially bearded women, both on stage and off. John Bulwer's final observation also contains an implicit threat: the insubordination materialized by the female beard is so unnatural that it ultimately compromises the existence of the untenable bearded woman herself. Facially bearded women embodied not simply female insubordination but, more crucially, the failure of early modern English culture to master and manage female desire. These bearded women march and speak to the beat of a different drum, a foreign rhythm that signals their self-sufficient alterity in every register: sexual, generic, economic, erotic, political, religious, and so forth.
