The "Dress-à-la-Independance" was a style of hair-dressing with thirteen curls at the neck, thus to honor the thirteen new States.
In the year 1771 Anna Green Winslow wrote in her diary an account of one of these elaborate hair-dressings which she then saw. She ends her description thus:
"How long she was under his opperation I know not. I saw him twist & tug & pick & cut off whole locks of gray hair at a slice, the lady telling him he would have no hair to dress next time, for a space of an hour and a half, when I left them he seeming not to be near done."
She also gives a most sprightly account of the manufacture of a roll for her own hair:
"I had my Heddus roll on. Aunt Storer said it ought to be made less, Aunt Deming said it ought not to be made at all. It makes my head ach and burn and itch like anything Mama. This famous Roll is not made wholly of a Red-Cow Tail but is a mixture of that & horsehair very coarse & a little human hair of a yellow hue that I suppose was taken out of the back part of an old wig. But D. (the barber) made it, all carded together and twisted up. When it first came home, Aunt put it on, and my new cap upon it; she then took up her apron and measured me & from the roots of my hair on my forehead to the top of my notions I measured above an inch longer than I did downward from the roots of my hair to the end of my chin. Nothing renders a young person more amiable than Virtue and Modesty without the help of fals hair, Red-Cow tail or D. the barber."
The Boston Gazette had, in 1771, a ludicrous description of an accident to a young woman in the streets of that town. In an infaust moment she was thrown down by a runaway, and her tower received serious damage. It burst its thin outer wall of natural hair, and disgorged cotton and wool and tow stuffing, false hair, loops of ribbon and gauze. Ill-bred boys kicked off portions of the various excrescences, and the tower-wearer was jeered at until she was glad to escape with her own few natural locks.
A New England clergyman—Manasseh Cutler—wrote thus of the head-dress of Mrs. General Knox in 1787:
"Her hair in front is craped at least a foot high much in the form of a churn bottom upward and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is in a large braid turned up and confined with a monstrous large crooked comb. She reminded me of the monstrous cap worn by the Marquis of La Fayettes valet, commonly called on this account the Marquises devil."
Hair so elaborately arranged could not be dressed daily. Once a week was frequently thought sufficient; and some very disgusting accounts are given of methods to dress the hair so it would "keep safely" for a month. The Abbe Robin wrote of New England women in 1781:
"The hair of the head is raised and supported upon cushions to an extravagant height somewhat resembling
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