Kay Keller, age 10, of San Diego, California, for her question:

Why are only girls supposed to have long hair?

When General George Washington was President of the United States, everybody was supposed to have long hair. Most of the bald men wore wigs, which they called periwigs. Benjamin Franklin refused to cover his partially bald head with a periwig    and this created quite a stir. In the 1920s, smart girls were supposed to bob their hair short. This also created quite a stir. A few years ago, an uproar arose when boys decided to wear longer hair styles.

Mother Nature decides what the bears and beavers must wear. Animals have no say about how they will look to the rest of the world. But people must decide what clothes and hair styles they will wear. Perhaps they invented fashions to make these decisions easier. A person tends to feel comfortable in a stylish outfit, just because it appears to be in step with the times. But times change    and fashionable styles change with them.

Every page of history could be illustrated with pictures of the clothes and hair styles that people were supposed to wear at the time. Usually their outward appearances reflected how they lived and often what they thought. For example, the women who wore those ridiculous crinolines lived rather ridiculous lives. The Pilgrims chose simple styles to reflect their faith in the simple, unpretentious life. Almost always, men and women dressed differently, perhaps to express the different roles they were supposed to play.

For several past centuries, men were supposed to wear pants and women were supposed to wear skirts. However, throughout most of history, everybody wore long hair styles. Then a few generations ago, it became stylish for men to cut their hair short and very soon, any boy with long hair was considered unmanly. Early in the 1900s, the women of most countries won the right to vote    and adopted some new styles to express their new freedom.

For a while, every smart girl was supposed to bob her hair short. Then, of all things, they tock to wearing pants. At the time, these startling styles created quite an uproar. But by the time you came along, everybody took them for granted. Nowadays, nobody minds very much whether girls wear skirts, pants or miniskirts. And nowadays, any girl may wear her hair long or short. If she is sensible, she chooses the style that happens to suit her    so long as it's comfortable.

A few years ago, boys decided that they too were tired of the stiff old styles that looked like uniforms. They chose more comfortable clothes and longer, more attractive hair styles. As usual, their new styles created an uproar    even though most of their male ancestors wore long hair and very fancy clothes indeed.