I was doing a little research about fashion in 1876. I'm pretty good with costume history, but I was trying to get clear in my mind what Libbie and the other women would have been wearing and then what her mourning clothing would be like. While I was checking the Internet, I found a couple of sites that discussed hygiene, including hair.
I thought this was interesting: because people had to wash their hair with soap and it made hair really dry, they didn't do it very often. Instead, they would give it 100 brush strokes to both get the oil distributed to the ends and get rid of dust or whatever. They used scented oils.
They really like the glossy, oily look, which of course, would hold their complicated styles better than freshly washed hair. It wasn't until the invention of modern shampoos in, I believe, the 1950's, that washing your hair often became a practice.
I'd go so far as to say that wasn't typical until the '60's with the notion that clean, natural hair was the fashion. I know my friends and I gave up curlers, hair dryers and, especially getting your hair "done" in about 1966.
Of course, women, and men, in the late-19th Century could use hot curling irons, fake hair and hair oils and potions. Well, people through out history probably figured out how to do that.
I think it was Libbie who wrote that army ladies (officers' wives) would get to town after several months on a post and discover their hair style was very much out of fashion. They would send their husbands out to buy extra hair. They used braids and curls and even pieces for the front.
I guess their hats or the caps they wore in the morning or evening would cover whatever.
