You won’t often find me writing about fashion on account of my personal fashion choices are rarely in-step with the modern era. However, I’m thrilled to discuss the subject from an historical perspective, and that’s just the topic a friend and I recently found ourselves on when looking at an old, family photo.

In 1907 my great-great grandparents sat for a photo with 7 of their 12 children (the two eldest children had already left home and the youngest three were not yet born). My cousin asked, “What’s up with their hair?” Our ensuing chat left me with a few thoughts I wanted to share with you dear readers.

First of all, fashion looks very different in hindsight. We’ve talked here before about the way I study these old photos – there is so much more in a picture than the face of an ancestor. I know that this family was far from wealthy, but neither were they destitute. You see the children are all nicely dressed, yet the boys are only in gallused pants and white shirts.

The two girls standing on the left of the photo are twins, Marthy and Bithy – technically the names are MarthA and TobithA, but in our mountain vernacular, those names are universally pronounced with a long “e” sound at the end. Notice they are wearing matching plaid skirts and high necked Victorian blouses. They are not in homespun, yet the skirts may have been from feed sacks. Because we know that photographs were rare and valuable, the family surely dressed in their Sunday best.

And these teenage girls undoubtedly spent time coiffing their hair in the styles they’d studied in the ladies’ magazines. Victorian hairstyles are widely covered in blog articles so a search quickly yields portraits and publications of the era. The styles were large and elaborate. It was a day when women did not cut their hair, so they generally had plenty to work with. Additionally, they added switches and rats to puff and pad wherever natural growth was considered insufficient.

That much hair was hard to manage so women only washed it once a month – there were actually published instructions for brushing between washes. Unlike the sets of the 1960’s and 1970’s, these styles had to be re-created every day. Up-dos were un-done every night and all that hair was brushed or aired to promote healthy scalp and roots. Women usually covered their hair when doing heavy duty cooking and cleaning. A net or snood was often used to contain the hair during days at home. These steps would help to keep the hair free of dust as well as keeping it out of the way for work. (Just a personal note, with today’s long styles I often wonder how anybody gets any real work done. I have to have my hair up when I’m working – although the ponytail I’m currently sporting hardly compares to these ladies!)

Note that Ova Todd (back row far right) is only 12-13 years old (depending on just what month of the year it is) at the time this photo was made, yet her hair is up just like her 14 or 15 year old sisters. Young girls wore their hair down on their shoulders, put back in ribbons or braids. It was a right-of-passage to get to put your hair up and I can just imagine Ova begging her mother and arguing that she really was old enough. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before but this is one of my biggest pet peeves with period movies and television: because our styles today are lend toward hair being down, I see stars portraying Victorian-era women with their hair hanging down their back. It seems like such an easy thing to be historically accurate in that I don’t know why Hollywood producers don’t get it right.

Perhaps the Todd girls’ high foreheads didn’t lend themselves to the feminine pompadour, but they succeeded in volume and poof. Remember that the solemn looks are more about photographic tools than the family’s state of mind.