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boys hair styles -- gender destinctions chronology
American Children's Hair Styles: Gender Distinctions
Figure 1.--This is a cabinet card portrait of a sister and brother, the girl standing on stairs. The girlwea adark dress, the boy a kilt suit. They are coordinated with lrge white collars. On the back in pencil is written 'Mary' and 'Jamie', but no last names. Notice that Mry has center part and Jamie a side part, So even if the children had not been identified e would have know that they were a boy and girl even though both have short hair. The portrait is undated, butwe would guess was taken about 1880. The studio was Wadell in Warrensburg, Mo. (Missouri).
Boys and girls have normally wore destinctive hair styles. In fact, hair styles have commonly been more gender destinctive for younger boys than clothing. Boys for many years wore dresses and since the 1960s girls have commonly worn pants and other boy styles. Now boys have been most associated with short styles and girls with long styles, but over time we have seen many boys wearing long hair and girls wearing short hair. Length is an imprtant clue, bur even more consistent is the part. Boys had side parts abnd girls center parts. The gender connotation is not absolute, but used with length is a very strong indicator.
What is relatively rare is mothers using the same hair styles for siblings. Notably when long ringlet curls were worn by boys, it is relatively rare for mothers to do sister's hair in similar ringlets. That it not to say that mothers never did this, but as far as we can tell it was not at all common. I'm not sure about the family dynamics here. Perhaps more mothers wanted to do this, but fathers put their foot down. Perhaps it was essentially a decesion by mothers. Here we are not entirely sure. Boys and girls have not always worn destinctive styles. We see quite a number of images in the photographic record in which siblings havethe same hair cut. Normally this was a convention for younger children. The more common approch was to hve destinctive styles.
