We should not be greatly surprised, then, to discover that early in the history of the colonies the magistrates tried zealously to regulate the style and cost of female clothing.  The deluded Puritan elders, who believed that everything could and should be controlled by law, even attempted until far into the eighteenth century to decide just how women should array themselves.  But the eternal feminine was too strong for the law makers, and they ultimately gave up in despair.  Both in Virginia and New England such rules were early given a trial.  Thus, in the old court records we run across such statements as the following:  “Sep. 27, 1653, the wife of Nicholas Maye of Newbury, Conn., was presented for wearing silk cloak and scarf, but cleared proving her husband was worth more than L200.”  In some of the Southern settlements the church authorities very shrewdly connected fine dress with public spiritedness and benevolence, and declared that every unmarried man must be assessed in church according to his own apparel, and every married man according to his own and his wife’s apparel.[128] Again in 1651 the Massachusetts court expressed its “utter detestation that men and women of meane condition, education and calling should take upon them the garbe of gentlemen by wearinge of gold or silver lace or buttons or poynts at their knees, or walke in great boots, or women of the same ranke to wear silke or tiffany hoods or scarfs.”

A large number of persons were indeed “presented” under this law, and it is plain that the officers of the times were greatly worried over this form of earthly pride; but as the settlements grew older the people gradually silenced the magistrates, and each person dressed as he or she, especially the latter, chose.

II.  Contemporary Descriptions

The result is that we find more references to dress in the eighteenth century than in the previous one.  The colonists had become more prosperous, a little more worldly, and certainly far less afraid of the wrath of God and the judges.  As travel to Europe became safer and more common, visitors brought new fashions, and provincialism in manner, style, and costume became much less apparent.  Madame Knight, who wrote an account of her journey from Boston to New York in 1704, has left some record of dress in the different colonies.  Of the country women in Connecticut she says:  “They are very plain in their dress, throughout all the colony, as I saw, and follow one another in their modes; that you may know where they belong, especially the women, meet them where you will.”  And see her description of the dress of the Dutch women of New York:  “The English go very fashionable in their dress.  But the Dutch, especially the middling sort, differ from our women in their habit, go loose, wear French muches, which are like a cap and a head band in one, leaving their ears bare, which are set out with jewels of a large size, and many in number; and their fingers hooked with rings, some with large stones in them of many colors, as were their pendants in their ears, which you should see very old women wear as well as young.”