What happened when I — a 58-year-old woman — shaved my head

Men, I perceived early on, don’t like short hair on women. And, since we live and work in an overwhelming patriarchy, to have short hair has been, if often on a subtle level, to defy men. I’ve carried this understanding with me – but decided to let go.

My hair will soon be shaved off completely, not at the hairdressers, but in a clinical hospital setting, an unashamedly fashion-free zone. The reason? I’m having a new form of brain surgery at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital in the hope of ameliorating at least some of the mysterious tics and hand tremors I’ve had since I was a young teenager, that have worsened with age.

Tremor by Sonya Voumard.

Tremors of the body affect more than 800,000 Australians. An estimated 70,000 have dystonia, the little-known movement disorder for which I’m scheduled to have my brain zapped. The condition has myriad manifestations. For me, it means being hampered when performing simple tasks like drinking and eating because my hands shake when I lift a cup or a knife and fork. At other times my head shakes. In social situations, I mask these difficulties to avoid the attention that they attract. This can make me seem secretive, as if I have a hidden agenda.

Sonya before the operation on her brain

The treatment, in the radiology department, isn’t a guaranteed fix, and it can only be done on a completely bald head. I find the idea of being bald simultaneously exciting and scary. In the punk days, I found women who shaved their heads both ­attractive and repellent. You couldn’t deny it was confronting and an act of power – a rejection of traditional notions of beauty and submission in which women’s hair both enhanced and enslaved them.

I’ve gone through periods of having very short hair. In my pre-teen years, neighbourhood children, younger than me, told my little sister I looked like a boy. Some seemed obsessed with what they must have seen as some kind of gender error. I didn’t much care, but I think it upset my sister at the time, since gender nonconformity wasn’t the stuff of compliments when we grew up.

Sonya Voumard with her hair, which she has always considered messy.

When I was 12, I went to visit my godmother in Hong Kong. My hair was super short. The people I met there thought it was cute. An American girl, who was slightly older than me, said I reminded her of Tatum O’Neal in the movie Paper Moon, a comparison I found pleasing. In my first year of high school, I didn’t mind my short hair being seen as a Sharpie cut, because Sharpies were tough, and it gave me a certain cred with people you’d otherwise steer clear of.

When I was in senior high school, it grew into thick, long locks that I never brushed. Once, it got caught in the low hanging branches of a tree and I had to tear a knotted mess out to set myself free. This made me late for school, with a story the school mistress found implausible.

“You’re having me on,” she said. For once, I wasn’t. She gave me a late pass anyway.

A woman once told me she was lucky with her hair. It was thick, voluminous and had aged into a distinguished grey. The same could not be said for mine, a fine, dirty-blonde mess of curls that has thrown up plenty of bad hair days, especially when it rained. But unruly hair always suited my self-image.

How will I feel in its absence? I worry I’ll look like a Buddhist nun. Or worse, a Christian nun. I have remembered Audrey Hepburn as Sister Luke having her locks sheared off in the 1959 film The Nun’s Story, a scene imprinted on my mind as horrific, since childhood. Similarly unforgettable was the image of Vanessa Redgrave playing the Holocaust-surviving musician Fania Fenelon, in Playing for Time, based on Fenelon’s autobiography, The Musicians of Auschwitz.

I asked a woman at yoga about her shaved head. She said she did it to feel liberated after a divorce. She let me touch it. She looked cool. But she was much younger than I was. Being a bald, 58-year-old woman, to me, suggests one thing. Illness.

I read that some men shave their heads as a statement of power. But women’s shaved heads have long been symbols of shame and punishment; from the early Germanic Visigoths in the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages when a shaved head was meant to deprive a woman of what was supposedly her most seductive attribute.

Shaving women’s heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. German women who had relations with French troops after they occupied the Rhineland in 1923 later suffered the same fate. And during World War II, the Nazi state issued orders that women accused of sleeping with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners employed on farms should also be publicly punished in this way.

The longer my (never very long) hair, the more favourable responses I’ve had from men. Men, I perceived early on, don’t like short hair on women. And, since we live and work in an overwhelming patriarchy, to have short hair has been, if often on a subtle level, to defy men. I’ve carried this understanding around the corporate workplace with me. The longer and better groomed my hair, the more comfortable it has been when dealing with senior executives. I’ve applied this expectation to both male and female leaders, observing many among the latter to be as stringent, if not more so, about how women should look in the male-dominated workplace.

A female manager once, after I’d had it cut, told me she preferred my hair longer. She, herself, would always apply lipstick before a meeting with a senior executive, and encouraged me to do the same. I didn’t.

Once, we were sitting together in a cafe downstairs from our office, when the chief executive and a senior executive with whom she was in poor favour, entered. She had her back to the approaching leaders, so I warned of their approach. Her first reaction was to reach into her handbag, lower her face into a mirror and apply lipstick. The moment was small, but the dynamic implicit, and it remains one of the more memorable moments I’ve witnessed in the corporate world. It seemed to say so much about the reflexive nature of approval-seeking by some women in the workplace.

Shortly before agreeing to the surgery on my brain, I decided to let go of most of my hair. I called the Sydney salon in Paddington and arranged an appointment with my new stylist, Shalom. A final-year apprentice, Shalom has a mass of long, black hair and an attractive groundedness I’ve rarely experienced in a hairdresser. I’d previously told her that I would, in time, have to get my head shaved for a medical procedure.

Shalom moved slowly and gracefully towards the chair I was sitting in, looked at me in the mirror and said with a half-smile, “So, is today the day?”

“No, but I want to go short before I lose it all four weeks from now.”

I told Shalom to leave one piece, my right forelock. I wasn’t ready to let go of everything, yet. She went to work. Bunched up my front forelock, pinned it at the top of my head and slowly chopped off the rest of my hair. About halfway through the thirty-five-minute process, I felt a strong sense of energy and excitement. At the back, she’d cut to the grain of my hair, which skews to the left in what I discovered to be a pleasing revelation of asymmetry. The other thing I like about Shalom is that we hardly talk. But at the end of the cut, as we looked at it together from every angle, she said, “We should have done this ages ago”.

This is an edited extract from Tremor by Sonya Voumard. The book won the nonfiction category of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize for works between 20,000 and 40,000 words.