What a coincidence! The ladies of the French Revolution had the same idea!
Back in the 50s (at least in Midwest Suburban Evangelical families), a woman wasn’t expected to have a career. Sure, she could be a teacher or a nurse until she got married, but then she got to (actually, kind of had to) quit and be a stay-at-home wife and mother.
So your one chance at a comfortable life was to be attractive to men.
The right (“feminine”) hair, the right makeup, the right clothes made a HUGE difference.
My mom often regrets that she didn’t really have any marketable skills, and wished she’d gotten a medical degree: “But that just wasn’t done. Women didn’t have a career in my day.”
“Oh, really, mom? So you were born before Marie Curie? Or Elizabeth Blackwell?” (just looked her up, that was 1849!)
Hmmm… I read that at first as “God loves a fryer,” which I also believe to be true.
I think they wear Big Hair because it comes in the box with the Big Eyelashes.
Big hair makes you closer to God.
My hair points to the sky
The place I want to be
“Fundamentally Oral Bill”:
Aimee Semple McPherson, early 20th century superstar female evangelist, was not a believer in big hair.
“Let me disprove your wider point by introducing these extraordinary women as exhibits A and B.” It’s true, there have always been individuals like Marie Curie, Joe Carstairs, Walter White, or C.J. Walker who were able to go against the norms and expectations of society at that time, but that doesn’t change the truth that women or others who wanted to become medical doctors or have certain careers had the deck stacked against them.
I don’t know the answer to the OP but it could be they were influenced by the hair styles of many women who are country music artists. Dolly Parton is usually seen with ‘big hair’, it’s a wig of course, but at one time it was typical in the genre.
Are the styles similar to the styles worn by TV women at the time these women were in High School?
I don’t know that, but that’s another probable explanation. I don’t know who these women are because I don’t watch Christian Broadcasting. I remember Tammy Faye Baker went over the top with hair and makeup as well, but she had a special type of insanity.
Nah. Mainstream TV women never had hair like that. Especially network TV. I have no first hand knowledge of small town southern TV.
Twenty years on, we can now apply AI (or rather Big Data) to the question. Pudding.cool analyzed 30,000 yearbook photos from 1930-2013 to track the rise and fall of Big Hair. The Big Data of Big Hair
For women, Big Hair’s peak was in 1986. Small hair’s trough was in 1930, the beginning of the dataset. Oddly, dude big hair peaked in 1978, almost a decade before the female peak.
Texas Monthly, Dec 1992, indicates that the style has always been controversial and a cause for speculation.
Hooray for Big Hair!:
It arrives like a blimp, floating ethereally through the door before the rest of the woman’s body does. For a moment, you can look at nothing else. You try to stare at the woman’s face, at her dress, even down at her shoes—but your eyes keep wandering upward. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, you find yourself once again awestruck by that towering, impenetrable edifice known as . . . Big Hair.
The most scorned fashion statement of our day, the target of rabid eradication campaigns by modern hairstylists, Big Hair hangs on like a buzzard in the desert.
Aimee Semple McPherson, early 20th century superstar female evangelist, was not a believer in big hair.
Is that why she had to disappear/be kidnapped?
Big hair, you’re such a honey
I wanna take you to a pretty place that I know
Where we’ll be unmolested
And we can jump and shout until the morning glow
- “Big Hair” by Nick Lowe
Big Hair can be dangerous, too. If you style it into a beehive, you might attract black widow spiders.
At one point, supposedly, some 10-15% of Los Angelenos went to get church. Can that be true?
Church’s Chicken?
Frank Church?
Espèce d’autocorrect! Tabernouche!. Her church.
To Amy Semple’s church. I read that somewhere and it seemed quite unlikely.
In 1920, Los Angeles had a population of about 500,000. 10-15% is 50,000-75,000. If the estimate is the total number affiliated with her church, not the number attending on any given day, I don’t find it impossible to believe.