"In Rapunzel's Daughters, Rose Weitz, a prominent sociologist, explores how and why hair matters so much in girls' and women's lives. She begins by surveying the history of women's hair, from the covered hair of the Middle Ages to the two-foot-high, wildly ornamented styles of pre-Revolutionary France to the purple dyes worn by some modern teens.

Weitz examines - through interviews with dozens of girls and women across the country - what hair means today, to young girls and to women; how girls learn to consider it central to their identity; what part it plays in adolescent (and adult) struggles with identity and with romance; how it can create conflicts and opportunities in the workplace; and how women face the changes in their hair that illness and aging can bring."--Jacket.