Why Women of Color in the 1800s Were Banned From Wearing Their Hair in Public
▻http://blackgirllonghair.com/2014/07/shocking-history-why-women-of-color-in-the-1800s-were-banned-from
Tignon Law
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tignon#Tignon_Law
This headdress was the result of sumptuary laws passed in 1786 under the administration of Governor Esteban Rodriguez Miró. Called the tignon laws, they prescribed and enforced appropriate public dress for female gens de couleur in colonial society. At this time in Louisiana history, women of African descent vied with white women in beauty, dress and manners. Many of them had become the placées (openly kept mistresses) of white, French, and Spanish Creole men. This incurred the jealousy and anger of their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and fiancées. One complaint was that white men pursuing flirtations or liaisons sometimes mistook upper-class white women for light-skinned women of African descent and accosted them in an improper manner.
To prevent this, Governor Miró decreed that women of African descent, slave or free, should cover their hair and heads with a knotted headdress and refrain from “excessive attention to dress” to maintain class distinctions.
Historian Virginia M. Gould notes that Miró hoped the law would control women “who had become too light skinned or who dressed too elegantly, or who, in reality, competed too freely with white women for status and thus threatened the social order.”[1]
Origin of The Tignon
▻http://www.frenchcreoles.com/ArtTheater/tignon/origins%20of%20tignon.htm
Turban, voodoo and Tignon law in Louisiana
▻http://b-womeninamericanhistory19.blogspot.fr/2009/05/tignon-laws-in-louisiana.html
