Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 October 1885 — Colonial Head-Dresses. [ARTICLE]

Colonial Head-Dresses.

The dressing of women’s hair kept pace with that of men. The “commode” or “tower” head-dress rose to a great height in the days of Queen Anne, and then declined to rise into a new deformity in the years just proceding the American Revolution. In 1771 a bright young girl in Boston wrote to her mother in the country a description of the construction upon her own head of one of the coiffures, composed of a roll of red cow’s tail mixed with horse hair and a little human hair of a yellow color, all carded and twisted together and built up until by actual measurement the superstructure was an inch longer than the face below it. Of a hair-dresser at work on an another lady’s head, she says: “I saw him twist and tpg and pick ana cut off whole locks of gray hair at a slice for the space of a hour and a half, when I left him, he seeming not to be near done.” One may judge of the vital necessity there was for all this art from the fact that a certain lady in Annapolis about the close of the colonial period was accustomed to pay S6OO a year for the dressing of her hair. On great occasions the hairdresser’s time was so fully occupied that some ladies were obliged to have their mountainous coiffures built up two days beforehand, and to sleep sitting in their chairs, or, according to a Philadelphia tradition, with their heads inclosed in a box.