Roberta Mckern
On a hot July day the East Linn Museum held its annual yard sale. Volunteers tending the cash box sat watching seekers pass among tables loaded with donated goods on their yearly treasure hunt. Most shoppers were dressed less than more in light weight clothing. A number showcased tattoos. Many lengths of hair in varied colors also passed by, green, blue, purple, pink and maroon.
To step into the Museum from the yard scene made quite a contrast. Our local patriarchs and matriarchs dressed up to look their best gazed down from the walls, some from wedding pictures. Men with carefully trimmed mustaches and beards and the women with long hair pulled severely back or swept up in pompadours show their adherence to propriety for they were spending a considerable sum to appear in large photographic portraits on parlor walls. Considering the history of the East Linn area we can place these photographs as being from around 1900.
This was a conservative time reflected by the ways men wore their hair, beards and moustaches and women slicked their long hair back from the face, often into pompadours. This hair fashion beloved by ladies of the 1900’s originated in the 17th century associated with Madam Pompadour, the intellectual mistress of Louis IV of France. By 1900 it had moved into propriety.
That propriety shows in the clothing and hair styles of those on the walls. Hair is controlled. Now, think of the pink, maroon, green, blue or purple hair encountered outside at the yard sale. Today almost anything goes from buzzcuts to flowing, colorful locks. What was happening with hair around 1900?
For women, there were no beauty parlors. Those didn’t come about until women bobbed their hair in the 1920’s. Some went to barber shops to slide into decadence, and the realization came, here was opportunity. There was money to be had in cutting and caring for women’s hair.
Back in the earlier 1900’s, however, women were mostly on their own. Relatives and friends might help tend long hair, and wealthy women could afford to call in hair dressers for special occasions. Mail order catalogs offered some hair care products for men and women and self help books prompted housewives on the manufacture of everything from shampoo and hair tonics to depilatories.
Here is a note about human hair: most men and women’s hair does not grow longer than 18” to 30”. We’ve heard of Rapunzel and Lady Godiva. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair” a swain calls up to her window in the tower so he can ascend. And Lady Godiva rides through the streets of Coventry convincing her husband to lower taxes on the peasantry, wearing only her long, long hair. These tales have a basis in truth. A genetic dispensation does allow some people to grow longer hair, sometimes up to six feet in length.
The women in the Museum’s portraits all wear long hair as a symbol of feminine maturity. When girls reached marriageable age, their skirt lengths went down and their hair swept up, advertising, we might think, their availability.
We can detect, too, age reflected in the way the Museum’s ladies wear their hair. Jane Malinda Weddle and Anna Kirk Barr of the older generation wear their hair parted and slick, held determinedly back from the face. It’s the younger ones who go for the “Gibson Girl” look with pompadours popularized in the 1900’s by Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of aloof beauties. Two brides pictured, Daisy Weddle and Maud Sportsman, copy Gibson’s.
So how were all of these tresses cared for? Some women ordered from the catalogs like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. Others turned to the advice books, Household Discoveries by Sidney Morse being one.
The Sears catalogs preferred hair disasters. “Are you bald?” Sears inquired. If so, they’d sell you Princess hair restorer and tonic. Better yet, they offered curls, waves, braids, wigs and toupees for those needing augmentations. Sears boasted of selling more hair than any other house. Send a sample to be matched. Gray, red and blonde hair were more expensive than ordinary brown. The net tubes filled with hair and with string at each end, the “rats” to be fastened to the head to bulk up a pompadour could also be had in black, brown or blonde in three sizes. They did not have to match the customer’s hair color exactly.
Other products in 1908 included Perfumed Scalp food, Barber’s Favorite shampoo, Pomade Philasome–excellent for the hair or mustache, hair curling fluid crystal shampoo jelly, Belle zaire Brilliantine and Perfect combination Hair Dye for shades of brown to deep black. And that was about it.
Rapunzel might have ordered a “fall” to lengthen her hair, but for real hair care she would have done better to dust off her degree in chemistry and turn to “Household Discoveries Humbug” the author declares of hair restorers. None work. Hair today, gone tomorrow remains unchanged. Better to care for the hair and nourish it with frothily beaten egg yolk massaged into the scalp. The simplest shampoo, is one part aqueous ammonia to ten parts water, but rinse well and his shampoo recipes also call for carbolic acid, alcohol, sherry, camphor, cream of tartar, borax and turpentine as varied ingredients. Why such harsh ingredients? Because in general women washed their long locks once a month, perhaps twice, if they had oily hair. Sometimes, in winter, once a month likely proved too often. Hair care was a chore.
Because elite ladies could hire someone to come into the home and assist, Sidney Morse suggests this to be a good opportunity for ambitious women to earn extra money. His shampoos are designed to strip the oils from the hair. If this is too harsh, rub in a little lanolin after the washing, or maybe some processed marrow from a beef bone. But no bear grease. Too smelly! He also offers recipes for hair dyes and depilatories. One hair dye recipe calls for boiling milk, honey, rosemary leaves and young grape tendrils. Another simply uses the hulls from black walnuts. This might beat out the folk remedy of relying on black or brown shoe polish tried by some men.
Compared with hair care circa 1900, we have to be grateful for hair care today. Hair is after all a human universal. We use it to signal many things socially, in religions and politics. If the pompadours women wore in the past showed conformity, the various hair colors seen during the Museum’s yard sale may claim individuality. Or is that just conformity to a trend for peculiarly dyed hair commercially touted?
The Museum is planning another Rock Day with Robert Rose’ on September during Museum hours from 11 to 4 pm Bring rocks and be informed.