Home Life in Colonial Days, by Alice Morse Earle, 1974, is a book I keep on my genealogy shelf and refer back to often. Such interesting information about our ancestors!
Take the subject of wigs for men. Author Earle waxes poetically about this fashion:
"There was one fashion which lasted for a century which was so untidy, so uncomfortable, so costly and so ridiculous that we can only wonder that it was endured for a single season.... I mean wig-wearing by men. The first colonists wore their own natural hair. The Cavaliers had long and perfumed love-locks; and though the Puritans had been called Roundheads, their hair waves, also, over the collar and often hung over the shoulder. The Quakers, also, wore long locks, as the lovely portrait of William Penn shows. But by 1675 wigs had become common enough to be denounced by the Massachusetts government and to be preached against by many ministers while other ministers proudly wore them.
Wigs were called horrid bushes of vanity and hundreds of other disparaging names which seemed to make them more popular. They varied from years to year; sometimes they swelled out at the sides or rose in great puffs or turned under in heavy rolls or hung in braids and curls and pigtails. They were made of human hair, calves' and cows' tails, of thread, silk and mohair. They had scores of silly and meaningless names such as "grave full-bottom," or "giddy feather-top."
They were bound and braided with pink, green, red and purple ribbons and sometimes all these colors on one wig. They were very heavy and very hot and very expensive, often costing what would be equal to a $100 today. The care of them was a great item, often ten pounds a year for a single wig and some gentlemen owned eight or ten wigs! Even children wore wigs!
After wigs had become unfashionable the natural hair was powdered and was tied in a queue in the back. This was an untidy, troublesome fashion which ruined the clothes for the hair was soaked with oil or pomatum to make the powder stick."
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