I should be unjust to the age were I to omit the mention of a special point of “physical culture” which has long been neglected. You find as you come into man’s estate, that hair has a tendency to grow upon your face. It is the mark by which God meant that men and women should be distinguished from each other in the crowd. That hair was placed there in infinite wisdom, but your fathers have been cutting it off from their chins in small crops for thirty to fifty years, thus impugning Nature’s policy, wasting precious time, drawing a great deal of good blood, creating a great deal of bad, and trying to erase from their faces the difference which was intended to be maintained between them and those of women. If you are a man and have a beard, wear it. You know it was made to wear. It is enough to make a man with a decent complement of information and a common degree of sensibility (and a handsome beard) deny his kind, to see these smooth-faced men around the streets, and actually showing themselves in female society! Let us have one generation of beards.

— Timothy Titcomb, Esq. 1858 Titcomb’s Letters to Young People