Could it be also that just having the hair down is seen as too “hippie”? If the hair is worn down covering the ears and part of the face it’s reminiscent of the 1960s.
My theory on these hairstyles, Spectre, is that a lot of these cults separated from mainstream Mormonism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when similar hairstyles were in fashion, and they’ve since “fossilized” into their current form.
That is, of course, entirely a wild ass guess, so don’t go quoting me.
IMS, traditionally, a woman only let her hair down for her husband ala Victorian times and (for all I know earlier). Hair cascading down the back is seen as sensual even to us non-cult non Mormon folk. Just think of the librarian or nurse or repressed spinster type in a movie taking her hair down. And also, doesn’t it say in the old testament somewhere that a woman is never to cut her hair or some such?
Just some thoughts.
I think that idea has merit. I’ll bet it makes them easier to spot or catch when they try to bolt, too…
No. It talks about men’s haircuts and beard trimming (Leviticus 19:27 "You shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shall you mar the corners of your beard’) but not women’s. There’s also the Nazarite, who can be male or female and doesn’t cut his or her hair (among other things), but that’s a voluntary vow, and their rules don’t apply to others. Maybe the NT?
It’s in 1 Corinthians, in Chapter 11, which talks about modesty for women and woman’s relationship with man. (That link goes to the Catholic Bible, but all the King James versions I could find online led to ugly sites.) Leave it to Paul to muck up women’s lives centuries after the fact.
Oops, I just quoted you. But only for purposes of conversation.
The FLDS broke away from the main stream of LDS in the 1930s. They did, however, have a sort of aesthetic theme, as the “true Mormons,” of reverting to the pioneer origins of the LDS. Hence (if anything about this group can be summed up in a “hence”), the pioneer-wear and the odd Hollywood Westerns (Dances with Wolves, excepted) hair.
Can someone 'splain a ‘rat’ and a ‘pincurl’ for me? I Googled but the sites I found didn’t really seem to explain so much as refer to them.
A rat is a sort of oval form, made out of either wool or a person’s collected “fall out” hair, that serves as a bit of a cushion or pad for a hair-do. You can wind hair around it for a bun, for example, and it would be a poofier bun than you’d have if you just rolled the hair on itself.
Pincurling is a way of setting hair into ringlets. You wind damp hair into a little ring, then secure it with a bobby pin or hair clip until it dries, then finger-comb it out.
10-Q so much 
Would you mind if I nitpick a little? There is no “Catholic Bible”. Catholics, Episcopalians, and, I think, some other denominations include the Apocrypha, but that’s the only difference I know of.
If you want a good reference site for Bible passages, I recommend Bible Gateway which not only lets you look up passages, but gives you side-by-side comparisons. Here’s a longer version of the section in 1 Corinthians 11:
If anyone’s interested in the King James Version of this passage, you can find it here. The only other references I could find to women and hair were a passage in Numbers 5 which covers what to do if a woman comits adultery and the passage in Luke 7 where a woman wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair.
One thing I’ve noticed about the news coverage of the FLDS situation in Texas is that, while little girls are all wearing long dresses with long hair, at least some of the little boys are wearing modern clothes and look like they’d be hard to distinguish from any other boy their age. I’m assuming they do this to make it clear to the girls and women that they are set apart and different from the broader world.
Some fundamentalist Christian groups believe a women’s hair is her “crowning glory” and should not be cut. Have you ever seen a photo of Shirley Phelps Roper?
I’m pretty sure they’re allowed to do other stuff like cooking, cleaning, childcare, clothesmaking, beekeeping, manual labor, etc. If you watch Big Love you’ll notice that the compound women seem to have alot of rather masculine skills like welding and working on cars.
Hmm…that seems to be a general trend for hardcore fundamentalist Christians.
The FLDS men and boys are required to wear long sleeves and long pants. Women are not allowed to wear the color red, but I’m not sure about the men and boys.
I found this comment re their garb by someone who now oversees their care to be darkly comical:
“They huddled together. It was very obvious they were scared. They were non-responsive. They looked like deer caught in the headlights,” said church leader Helen Pfluger, 59.
She estimates she spent at least 30 hours with the women and children over the weekend but said communications never rose above the most basic level.
“I felt like I was from Mars, that I was alien to them. There was not one thing we had alike, except that we were female and had children,” she said.
Pfluger said the children dressed in 19th-century garb, did not know what crayons or breakfast cereal were, and that they were not accustomed to some of the food they were offered.
“Our food made some of the children sick. They are used to drinking raw milk and they asked for it,” she said.
"When they had clothing needs, it was impossible to give them what they needed. Where are you going to find a long-sleeve, high-neck, loose-waist, long dress for a 3-year old girl?" she asked
This may be a slight highjack, but is somewhat relevant to the discussion around the bible quotes.
You know, this is really odd. When I was younger I used to do some Bible Quizzing. (Quick background: teams of middle/high school kids are given a specific book, or set of books from the bible that they will be quizzed over for the rest of the year. It’s set up basically like a baseball/football league, in that you travel to different churches during the year, and then go to a big national tournament at the end. There are general questions, but some specific verses are marked as “quote verses” which are to be memorized and quoted back word perfect in the allotted 20 seconds.)
Anyways. One year we covered 1 & 2 Corinthians. I actually remember parts of the above quoted section clearly. Matter of fact, I remember them so clearly that I am pretty sure they must have been quote verses. However, I am almost certain that all the verses that refer to women and their hair were NOT there. With some variance of wording allowed for different translations, the content I remember would have contained verses 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9.
Maybe I’m imagining things, as it was several years ago. But I could swear up and down that those verses were just plain not there.
This is a great article about the hair and dress of the FLDS:
http://www.sltrib.com/polygamy/ci_8908641
True, but there’s also the fact that male fashion has tended toward an unflattering bagginess, and what I think is excessive modesty in things like the fit of jeans and the length of shorts and trunks. If this incident were taking place thirty years ago, you’d probably see more marked differences in how the men dressed in the sect, versus outsiders.