Description:

Three stunning period photographs of "Moss Hair Girls"

A set of 3 Carte-de-Visites from c. 1880 of "Circassian beauties," referred to as Moss Hair girls. Each 2.25" x 3.5", affixed to period photographers backing, from "Chas. Eisenmann", Photographer.

Circassian beauties is a phrase used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northwestern Caucasus. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited, and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.

By the mid 1800's, the portrayal of a white woman as a rescued slave at the time of the American Civil War played on the racial connotations of slavery at the time. It has been argued that the distinctive hairstyle affiliates the side-show Circassian with African identity, and thus, resonates oddly yet resoundingly with the rest of her identifying significations: her racial purity, her sexual enslavement, her position as colonial subject; her beauty. The Circassian blended elements of white Victorian True Womanhood with traits of the enslaved African American woman in one curiosity

In the 1860s the showman P.T Barnum decided to capitalize and exhibit women whom he claimed were Circassian beauties. These woman were displayed at his American Museum in 1865. They wore a distinctive Afro-like hair style, (whose tall, teased hair styles were the precurser to the Afro style of the 1970's), which had no precedent in earlier portrayals of Circassians, but which was soon copied by other female performers, who became known as "moss haired girls". Circassian ancestry was not required. The combination of the popular issues of slavery, the Orient, racial ideology, and sexual titillation gave the reports of Circassian women sufficient notoriety at the time.

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