why DOES everyone think women's heads were routinely shaved upon admittance to a Victorian [mental hospital/workhouse/lock hospital/sometimes even just a normal hospital idk]
like places where that happened DID exist!
Workhouse children photographed by reformer Henrietta Barnett, late 1800s. probably not all are girls, but at least some likely are
female inmates photographed by Hugh Welch Diamond at the Surrey County Asylum, 1850s. note that Diamond was a physiognomy practitioner and may have intentionally disheveled or exaggerated these women's appearance to reflect "outward evidence" of their mental illness, but most of his subjects do have short hair
but you can find equal numbers of images where women and girls in these situations have more conventional long hair:
Interior of an asylum, St. Louis, USA, 1890s. It's blurry, but most of these women have typical shapes of 1890s updos visible.
Poplar Workhouse, London, probably 1890s-very early 1900s.
my guess is that it arose from the fact that some institutions did do that, combined with public concern about human hair for hairpieces, false curls, and falls coming from unsavory sources when the wearing of such was much more common than it is today (sometimes out of sympathy for the imagined involuntarily-shorn women, sometimes out of fears for the health of the better-off ladies who would unknowingly wear hair from "the great unwashed." it WAS the 19th century after all)
(most such hair came in fact from "hair fairs" in the European country, where buyers would travel around buying peasant women's hair offered more-or-less voluntarily. points about economic disadvantage forcing women into situations they didn't actually want can of course be made, but at minimum nobody was being held down and forcibly divested of their hair in these situations)
(note: "most" such hair. the Most is important there.)
additionally, since cutting or shaving hair in the event of a fever was commonplace, it's possible some doctors believed it might also help in the case of certain mental illnesses- or that the women in these institutions had simply been sick with physical ailments before being photographed. and the public then and now saw these photographs and assumed it was a routine practice. give it 150 years and the public assumes every single such institution just Did that as part of the intake process
it works well as a fictional device to show dehumanization of a character in an abusive Asylum of Horrors, too (can I get a Woop Woop from my fellow Lucille Sharpe Enjoyers), and its use there may cause some people to believe it was a real universality back then
but like yeah no not all potentially abusive Victorian institutions for women shaved their heads upon intake. most didn't, in fact, based on the visual media we have available
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