Writer Kate Williams has seen the good and the bad side of life with auburn tresses. Photo / iStock
Writer Kate Williams has seen the good and the bad side of life with auburn tresses. Photo / iStock
While other prejudices have been quashed, somehow it’s still okay to mock gingers. The flame-haired author Kate Williams fights back.
Who would be a ginger? Yes, television is alight with russet-haired beauties such as Demelza in Poldark, a couple of months ago we farewelled Mad Men's Christina Hendricks from our screens, and there's Nicole Kidman looking fabulous on the red carpet - but would you really want to be one? Titian and the Pre-Raphaelites might have loved them, yet through much of history, redheads have been reviled (one betrayed Jesus, after all) and even killed because of their hair. As St Jerome warned one Roman woman, Laeta, who asked him for advice about her daughter, Paula: "Do not dye her hair red, and thereby presage for her the fires of hell." Eek.
My name is Kate Williams and I am a ginger. I used to hate it. In the 1980s, growing up with red hair was a social disaster. I dreamt of fine blond hair I could blow-dry into a feathery cut, like Princess Diana's. I gazed hopefully at early photographs of myself as a twoddler, in which it was only a pale strawberry, in case it might go back. But I had to admit it: my hair was bright red - and horribly curly with it.
We're about 1 per cent of the global population and still viewed with big dollops of suspicion. In her fascinating new book, Red: A Natural History of the Redhead, Jacky Colliss Harvey explores how artists, writers, film-makers and even the odd politician have elicited shocking meaning from red hair.
Whether lying, sexual, tempestuous or evil, one thing is for sure: gingernuts can't hide in the background. Lydia Gwilt, the villainous vamp of Wilkie Collins' 1866 novel Armadale, has hair of "the one unpardonable, remarkable shade of colour which the prejudice of the northern nations never entirely forgives - it was red".
Ginger hair comes with its own special gifts. I had white skin that burnt at the merest sight of sun, hundreds of freckles and pale eyebrows. Grown-ups would pat me in the street or play with my hair. Children just laughed. I was called "gingernut", "hair on fire" and "Duracell" (with the copper-coloured top) - but most often I didn't really need a name, I was just "that ginger one". In the 1980s, proper girls wore cerise puffball skirts and blond hair in a scrunchie. I just looked overheated in pink, and my hair exploded out of a scrunchie like lava from Vesuvius.
It didn't get any better as I became a teenager. Hairdressers fled when I appeared, frightened off by the naturally rather coarser texture of red hair, and the crazy curls. When I was 14, I visited an Italian penfriend at Lake Garda. All wonderfully bronzed and doing the evening walk, la passeggiata, around the town, she and her friends decided that if I just let myself burn, then I would go brown after that. We tried it. I went lobster red, peeled and then went back to being pale again. They (rightly) said I was a human emergency siren - red, white, red, white.
Prince Harry said: 'Virtually every ginger-haired child will have experienced some degree of name-calling at school.' Photo / Getty Images
My brother had exactly the same hair, but was braver than me, covering it (and occasionally the bathroom carpet) with bleach. But I felt sure that mere dye wouldn't be enough to squash the ginger that ran deep in my veins - the eyebrows, the freckles, everything.
I heard jokes as a child and cruel comments when I was a teenager about "ugly redheads" that sometimes made me hide away, since I was surely so unattractive. Even Prince Harry said: "Virtually every ginger-haired child will have experienced some degree of name-calling at school."
When English schoolgirl Helena Farrell took her own life in 2013, her father told the media she'd been driven to escape partly from being bullied for her red hair - and called for discrimination against red-haired people to be defined as a hate crime.
Is laughing at gingers the last acceptable face of discrimination, something we dismiss as "just a joke"?
An episode of South Park from 2005, Ginger Kids, in which Cartman declared gingers disgusting, inspired "Kick a Ginger" websites and a Facebook group of more than 5000 members. No matter that the characters in South Park had meant to prove that Cartman was wrong. The comments on one site are revelatory - a poor child says: "I'm so worried that it's going to become a thing, I have been bullied enough."
Redheads have often been on the receiving end of physical harassment, too. In 2012, a Southampton man, James Prior, suffered a "frenzied and sustained attack" because of the colour of his hair - his assailants pleaded guilty to committing actual bodily harm, but the crime was not logged as an expression of hate. The following year, parents had to take their children out of a South Yorkshire school because they were being physically attacked because of their hair.
Ed Sheeran. Photo / Getty Images
Even if they don't hate us, they're not sure about us. Redheads are reportedly seven times less likely to get a job than a dark-haired applicant, and surely some of these employers must be red-haired. We don't even want to employ ourselves. As for dating? Even worse. We humans tend to hook up with someone who looks rather like us - with the exception of two groups, redheads and albinos. Instead, we chase after partners with genes that might crush ours (like the glamorous Demelza with Captain Poldark). We redheads will try anything to save our offspring from the grim fate of spending summer slathered in factor 50. Or being called "ginga", the word chosen because, as one university friend so eloquently explained, "it rhymes with minger".
We gingers have probably lasted so long because we are efficient sun processors. Some Neanderthals are thought to have had red hair - so, did they laugh at their copper-tops? Probably. The earliest literary reference is by the Greek poet Xenophanes, describing the Thracians' blue eyes and red hair. But the classical world had little love for the Thracians. The red wig on the Greek stage denotes the slave - usually mocked in plays as lazy, disobedient and uncouth.
Probably only a small percentage of Thracians were red-haired. The same is true for the Ashkenazi Jewish population. There are, percentage-wise, many more Scots and Irish with red hair than Jews - yet red hair and Jewishness were continually linked in early modern Europe, most of all with Judas and his often flaming locks. Early productions of Shakespeare's Shylock had him sporting a red wig; Dickens's Fagin is a "shrivelled Jew", his "villainous-looking" face "obscured by a quantity of matted red hair".
In the history of redhead characterisation, men are often depicted as barbarians or clowns (think the wildly head-banging Animal from The Muppets or Stephen King's It), lying or insinuating like Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, or Judas-like betrayers. Women can be equally mendacious, but they are also portrayed as sexually voracious or vampish. The earliest is Lilith, Adam's first flame-haired wife, who refused to obey him and hurtled into the wilderness - ending up as a night demon and a witch. In 1946, Rita Hayworth bounced us out of postwar austerity by clutching one long black glove and demolishing men as Gilda (an atomic bomb tested in the same year was named after the character), and there is the cartoon glamourzon Poison Ivy, whose venomous kiss fells Batman. The message is clear: men, beware red-haired women.
Christianity has its own standout redhead: Mary Magdalene, often depicted with long, flowing red trusses. The loose, wild hair showed her as the transgressor, the repentant prostitute, the bad girl in the Christ story - even though there are no clear references to her in the Gospels as a sinner. Prostitutes wore their hair down and used henna dye to catch the eye, so although the red of Magdalene worked in paintings as a good contrast to the blue of the Virgin Mary, it also meant sexual danger.
The red-haired woman is often the witch, reminiscent of Lilith - in fact, we are so sure of it that we find ginger witches even when they don't exist. The essential handbook for any witch-hunter was the runaway best-seller, Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer Of The Witches, published in Germany in 1487. This volume complained about "women and girls with beautiful hair" - but of no particular colour. Still, when translating it into English for the first time in 1928, the witch-obsessed Rev Montague Summers inserted lots of passages about awful redheads.
The women who actually went to the stake in early modern Europe were generally elderly and poor, more likely to be grey-haired than anything else. But, clearly, we're so used to the idea that copper-haired gals are witches that we insert it even when it isn't there.
Mary Magdalene is often depicted with long, flowing red trusses. Photo / Getty Images
Not much of history was fun for the redhead. And then there was a turn-up for the books, with a fabulously ginger king in Henry VIII. No one accused Thomas Cromwell's chum of having a hot temper when he was chopping the heads off his wives - they didn't dare. But handsome Henry didn't set off a trend for being ginger. His courtiers didn't snap up red wigs, and the monarch himself preferred the famously swarthy Anne Boleyn. He may have been tough enough to thumb his nose at the Pope, but even he tried to beat down the ginger gene with a dark-haired partner.
Despite Henry's efforts, his daughter with Boleyn, Elizabeth, was a vibrant redhead. For the Virgin Queen, ginger was the greatest. Her father had declared her illegitimate - but red-haired, hardy and sumptuously dressed, she was his mini-me, much more so than Edward VI or Mary (who also had auburn in her hair). Elizabeth tried to redden up her locks and made her (ruddy) skin paler with lead concoctions to keep that real Tudor look.
With more than 80 wigs, she could have worn any colour she pleased, but Gloriana chose flaming russet. Interestingly, she had a penchant for men with a hint of ginger: handsome Robert Dudley and her Essex toyboy, Robert Devereux, who had a fetching auburn beard. But maybe she could break all the rules, since reproduction wasn't on her to-do list.
Still, after Elizabeth's death in 1603, the appeal of red hair faded. Thomas Middleton's play The Witch, written between 1609 and 1616, had witches cook up a brew with "juice of toad", "oil of adder" and "three ounces of the red-hair'd wench" - a song that was inserted into published versions of Macbeth after Shakespeare died in 1616. Under James I, red-haired wenches were as horrid as toads and adders.
We haven't had a ginger monarch since. The centuries passed and no one wanted a redhead. Then came the Pre-Raphaelites and their 19th-century russet revolution. As the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell put it, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was "hair mad". As she said, "if a particular kind of reddish-brown, crepe wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment, struggling for an introduction to the owner".
Rossetti's muse and later wife, Lizzie Siddal, is the ultimate redhead - and features on the front cover of Colliss Harvey's book, strumming a harp as La Ghirlandata, resplendent in green, orange-juice-coloured hair cascading around her. Rossetti and his friends painted female figures from Proserpina to Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott as beautiful ginger nuts. Their redheads weren't murderous or rapacious, but passive and devotedly faithful to their male lovers - the Victorian ideal.
Colliss Harvey suggests that artists place redheads in the centre of their works "for that vibrant dash of colour, that ability of red to draw the eye".
In Paris, Edgar Degas loved a redhead - you'd think that every model in Paris was copper-haired from looking at his works - and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec adored them. All his favourite models were redheads.
By the early 20th century, redheads could be good girls, too. In 1904, the Dundee Advertiser pronounced that "20 years ago, hair with a reddish tinge was called 'carrots'; now Titian-coloured locks are reckoned a definite beauty". In the following year, the novelist Elinor Glyn (herself a redhead) published Red Hair. Evangeline, her protagonist, has hair that suggests she's "bound to go to the devil" - instead, she escapes her venal guardian and marries the handsome hero, after winning over his uncle. Red hair rewarded.
Notable redheaded actresses: Christina Hendricks, Jessica Chastain and Amy Adams. Photos / Getty Images
Now, in the 21st century, redheads are in fashion. Building on resplendent red-haired movie stars from Hayworth to Jessica Rabbit, we've had new stars: Jessica Chastain, Amy Adams, Karen Gillan, et al. In 2011, Cryos International, the world's biggest sperm bank, based in Denmark, declared that it had stopped taking donations from ginger men, as there was no demand. There was an outcry, a surge in requests - and now there are 24 bright gingers on offer on its site. Taylor Swift - so powerful that she can change the mind of the mighty Apple Corporation - speaks to millions when she says, "I would do a ginger." There are now festivals devoted to gingers, and groups such as the Australian Red and Nearly Ginger Association are attacking the stereotypes - including the nickname "ranga", short for orang-utan, a traditional Aussie epithet for a redhead.
Colliss Harvey ends her book with a trip to the Redhead Days festival in Holland, surrounded by manes of hair, flaming circlets of the stuff, mothers, daughters, twins, a weekend of redhead music. She is stunned by all the hair, then gets used to it - and finally feels part of a tribe.
I think now that I should have valued my hair more. I should have prized its ability to strike fear into hairdressers, its sheer oddness. But as Joni Mitchell sang, "you don't know what you've got. Till it's gone." And now, mine is definitely on the way out. It is not as red as it was; it's straighter, and I recently cut it short for the first time since I was 4. My little girl is blond. I know she'll have an easier time of things as she grows up - now that the ginger hair has stopped with me.
Red: A Natural History of the Redhead (Allen & Unwin $32.99) is out this month.
