Notwithstanding Hannah Lyman and the thirty-six vain Northampton girls, we do not on the whole hear great complaint of extravagance in dress or deportment. At any rate none were called bouncing girls. The portraits of men or women certainly show no restraint as to richness in dress. Their sumptuary laws were of less use to their day than to ours, for they do reveal to us what articles of dress our forbears wore.
While the Massachusetts magistrates were fussing a little over woman’s dress, the parsons, as a whole, were remarkably silent. Of course two or three of them could not refrain from announcing a text from Isaiah iii, 16 et seq., and enlarging upon the well-worn wimples and nose jewels, and bells on their feet, which were as much out of fashion in Massachusetts then as now. It is such a well-rounded, ringing, colorful arraignment of woman’s follies you couldn’t expect a parson to give it up. Every evil predicted of the prophet was laid at the door of these demure Puritan dames,—fire and war, and caterpillars, and even baldness, which last was really unjust. Solomon Stoddard preached on the “Intolerable Pride in the Plantations in Clothes and Hair,” that his parishioners “drew iniquity with a cord of vanity and sin with a cart-rope.” The apostle Paul also furnished ample texts for the Puritan preacher.
Rebecca Rawson.
In the eleventh chapter of Corinthians wise Paul delivered some sentences of exhortation, of reproof, of warning to Corinthian women which I presume he understood and perhaps Corinthian dames did, but which have been a dire puzzle since to parsons and male members of their congregations. (I cannot think that women ever bothered much about his words.) For instance, Archbishop Latimer, in one of the cheerful, slangy rallies to his hearers which he called sermons, quotes Paul’s sentence that a woman ought to have a power on her head, and construes positively that a power is a French hood. This is certainly a somewhat surprising notion, but I presume he knew. However, Roger Williams deemed a power a veil; and being somewhat dictatorial in his words, albeit the tenderest of creatures in his heart, he bade Salem women come to meeting in a veil, telling them they should come like Sarah of old, wearing this veil as a token of submission to their husbands. The text saith this exactly, “A woman ought to have power on her head because of the angels,” which seems to me one of those convenient sayings of Paul and others which can be twisted to many, to any meanings, even to Latimer’s French hood. Old John Cotton, of course, found ample Scripture to prove Salem women should not wear veils, and so here in this New World, as in the Holland sojourn, the head-covering of the mothers rent in twain the meetings of the fathers, while the women wore veils or no veils, French hoods or beaver hats, in despite of Paul’s opinions and their husbands’ constructions of his opinions.
An excellent description of the Puritan women of a dissenting congregation is in Hudibras Redivivus; it reads:—
“The good old dames among the rest
Were all most primitively drest
In stiffen-bodyed russet gowns
And on their heads old steeple crowns
With pristine pinners next their faces
Edged round with ancient scallop-laces,
Such as, my antiquary says,
Were worn in old Queen Bess’s days,
In ruffs; and fifty other ways
Their wrinkled necks were covered o’er
With whisks of lawn by granmarms wore.”
The “old steeple crowns” over “pristine pinners” were not peculiar to the Puritans. There was a time, in the first years of the seventeenth century, when many Englishwomen wore steeple-crowned hats with costly hatbands. We find them in pictures of women of the court, as well as upon the heads of Puritans. I have a dozen prints and portraits of Englishwomen in rich dress with these hats. The Quaker Tub-preacher, shown [here], wears one. Perhaps the best known example to Americans may be seen in the portrait of Pocahontas [here].
Authentic portraits of American women who came in the Mayflower or in the first ships to the Massachusetts Bay settlement, there are none to my knowledge. Some exist which are doubtless of that day, but cannot be certified. One preserved in Connecticut in the family of Governor Eaton shows a brown old canvas like a Rembrandt. The subject is believed to be of the Yale family, and the chief and most distinct feature of dress is the ruff.