103. Sunbonnet

A portable building for the head

Sunbonnet, cotton, ca. 1840. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It was, fleetingly, the height of fashion. But long after sophisticates had moved on, the sunbonnet persisted, lowly but necessary. In the hard climate of the American south and west, women wore it for its utility, not its style. The bonnet was a portable building around the head, designed for lives spent mostly outdoors.

We can appreciate it in a way previous generations probably could not. When the 20th-century fashion for tanning had been taken to its logical conclusion, a dead end of baby oil and reflective foil, the sunbonnet seemed like an absurdly quaint relic. But we’ve drifted back to the earlier attitude towards sunlight. Today, the bonnet makes more sense.

But it was a double-edged sword, protecting and punishing both. It meant relief from the elements, but it trapped heat around the head and limited vision. Wearing one was like wearing horse blinders. The prairie was the most visually overwhelming landscape Americans had ever encountered, an ocean of grass you couldn’t see the end of. Hats for men shaded the eyes but preserved the horizon line. But the quintessential female headgear deliberately reduced the panorama to a tunnel.

Did women resist the sunbonnet, as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books suggest? Her heroine lets her sunbonnet hang down her back, defying her mother and sister’s entreaties to be more ladylike. In our imagination, it’s an adorable calico memento of the frontier, but perhaps in its day the sunbonnet was a weathervane for character: prim and proper, or stubbornly independent.

Women in St. Louis wearing sunbonnets, 1848. Detail of daguerreotype by Thomas Easterly. Missouri History Museum (source)

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Links:

• Mid-19th Century Sunbonnets – Sprigged and Spotted

• Her Sunbonnet Hung Down Her Back – Pamela Smith Hill, February 2, 2017

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!