Did married women have to cover their hair during the 16-20th century?
It was considered important for respectable women to cover their heads when they went out. Women generally wore hats of some kind when they went out, or in the 16th-17th century caps made of white linen. In the early 19th century bonnets were worn. It continued to be customary for women to wear hats when they went out up until the 1960s, when the custom began to go out of fashion. They might still have elaborate hairstyles under their hats though, depending on their social class, poor women of course would not have the time to arrange their hair in elaborate ways. For that matter, men generally wore hats as well, you didn’t see men going around bareheaded much. Hats were very important to women in the 18th-20th centuries. In the late 19th-early 20th century they became extremely elaborate, with ribbons, feathers, artifical flowers and fruit, even stuffed birds adorning them. If you read ‘Daddy Long Legs’ by Jean Webster for example (published in 1912) there is a scene where the heroine
