"Not only were the arms of New England women bared to an immodest degree, but their necks also, calling forth many a 'just and seasonable reprehension of naked breasts.' Though gowns thus cut in the pink of the English mode proved too scanty to suit Puritan ministers, the fair wearers wore them as long as they were in vogue.
"It is curious to note in the oldest gowns I have seen, that the method of cutting and shaping the waist or body is precisely the same as at the present day. The outlines of the shoulder and back-seams, of the bust forms, are the same, though not so gracefully curved: and the number of pieces is usually the same. Very good examples to study are the gorgeous brocaded gowns of Peter Faneuil's sister, perfectly preserved and now exhibited in the Boston Art Museum."
That the record made in this quotation may be complete, it must be supplemented by a few words devoted to another aspect of fashion among the early Puritans. This was in the matter of hair-dressing, that fashion which went to such enormous lengths in England during the eighteenth century. A curious fact is that the Puritan women seem generally to have worn "bangs"; and this fact is more of a certificate to their simplicity than to their taste. However, there was a large leaven of fashion in the towns of the Puritans; for in 1683 Increase Mather thus spoke of the mode of his day: "Will not the haughty daughters of Zion refrain their pride in apparell? Will they lay out their hair, and wear their false locks, their borders, and towers like comets about their heads?" These queries suggest decided lengths in head adornment, probably even to the adoption of the "heart-breakers" worn in 1670, which are described as "False locks set on wyers to make them stand at a distance from the head." One would think that such frank admission of falsity might plead its own excuse; but one Puritan minister describes the women of that time as "Apes of Fancy, friziling and curyling of their hayr."
Enough of dress and fashion! Yet some record thereof is pertinent here, for it shows us the gradual change which was being worked in the customs and ideas of New England. The colonies were becoming conventional; when modishness comes in at the door, individuality flies out at the window. The ideal of the home was being modified, not to say altered. There had always been among a certain element a love for the gauds and fripperies of the world, but it was not until the opening of the second colonial period that this element grew to the ascendency in New England. The old primitive simplicity as a national attribute was beginning to fail, and in its stead was being imported the conventional complexity of life in the mother country. New England was becoming more deserving of her name; she was growing to be a lesser England instead of a new civilization. She was fast falling into the errors that were undermining the true American spirit in the southern colonies.