It has to be a mystery of how women lost our hats. We can not fix the piece together. Just yesterday, it was all about the Hats when going to Church, but today it is the hair.
Until Vatican II, every woman wore a hat to church. The reason was that the Church made women wearing hats a rule in 1917. Before then they didn’t need a rule because no self-respecting woman would leave the house without her hat and gloves in the first place. But now we are lucky if the girl child wears on anything we consider clothing on at all.
Most people seemed to think, Vatican II took away the hat rule, or was it the Fashion rage?
Here is how it dropped.
Initially, in the mantilla rage, women didn’t have a fancy hat to wear in those days except during Easter. What most women wore at that time to Mass was a bandanna, and everyone showed up at Mass looking like Polish peasants. It graduated from there.
At a point, they thought that bandannas flattened out their hair (talking about the 60’s hairstyle) but mantillas do not, so they resulted to mantillas. This is very ironic considering why women had to wear a hat in the church in the first place. Because what was first invoke was the hats, and then to bandannas, to scarves, to mantillas, to the chapel veil or chapel doily, or even a handkerchief and now? Well, the hair.
Graduating from the mantilla to the chapel daily caused a lot of changes, that women since then had choices when it came to covering head for church. The chapel doily gave women free rein to use whatever they could find in their purses on their heads as long as there was a pin to hold it firm.
I don’t know how true it was but it was said that grandma’s across the globe wondered what happened to all their decorative end table laces for at least the past twenty to twenty-five years. And then all of a sudden. Could it be that the hats flew out the window because the church stopped the hat rule in 1983? But the church did not actually say that women don’t have to wear hats anymore. But since 1983 there has been no rule about hats in church.
I think that was a good way to leave things, considering there were women sitting in church with night table decor on their heads and Grandma at home wringing her hands. The whole thing had gotten out of hand.
The question we all should ask is; Why did women cover their heads in the first place?
A woman’s hair was considered her crowning glory so she covered her head in the church to show humility to God. Maybe that is why nuns cut off their hair more or less permanently.
Therefore, as a lady, if you want to wear something to show humility in God’s presence, go for it and do it right. Don’t leave your hair open, but at the same time, don’t just go off with your grandmother’s decorative end table laces.
