Saturday Morning Beard Fact

Since the beginning of time, some women have sprouted facial hair, yet the idea of a woman with a beard remains as much a taboo now as it was in the fifth century BC, when the Greek writer Herodotus wrote his Histories. In those he noted that people living near the city of Halicarnassus (now part of Turkey) lived in fear of the priestesses at the temple of Athena growing beards because it symbolised that something terrible was about to happen. The National Portrait Gallery’s archives contain two images of women with beards, both of whom lived in the seventeenth century, Anna Macallame and Barbara Urselin.

Source: Moustaches, Whiskers & Beards, Lucinda Hawksley