Erin Manning on headcoverings for Mass.

"Why does the head covering always have to be a 19th-century mediterranean mantilla – or whatever it is? You might as well wear an ancient Athenian helmet. What’s the idea here? Cover the hair? Cover the top of the head? Look almost like a (habited) nun while retaining enough distinction to show you’re not? Would a zaccheto do? Would a chador be too much?

"Which of the Easter bonnets in the movie Easter Parade would suffice?" 

I have often wondered about that, too…

A traditionalist website to which I will not link (a policy of mine) asserts that Christian women have practiced "veiling" for two thousand years; this "veiling" took place when women entered a church or were in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. I tend to smile, a little, at such statements–because there is such a false impression given by them. We see, in our mind's eye, a simple European peasant girl, passing by a church on a weekday; she pauses, makes the sign of the cross, carefully drapes a large and elegant lace veil over her head, and enters to make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament…

But a quick visit to the paintings of someone like Jean Francois Millet shows us what that peasant girl would more likely be wearing–a simple twist of some rough fabric, which she wore all the time to cover her head, not just when she happened to pass a church. Some nicer fabric, or an actual hat, might repose in her closet for Sunday; but lace, in the days before machine-made lace, was impossibly expensive and not likely to belong to most Catholic women.

In fact, a single lace mantilla in Madrid in the year 1830 could cost today's American equivalent of six hundred to two thousand dollars. Middle-class women scrimped and saved to afford mantillas with lace borders, while poorer women made do with fabric mantillas in the best fabric they could afford.

Did they do this to honor the Lord? Well, according to a book written in that time, in Madrid in 1830 women in the middle and lower classes still wore their mantillas as their "everyday" head coverings. Only the wealthiest women–the ones with the fanciest veils–started saving their mantillas for church and wearing the newer (and even more costly!) European hats to the theater and other social venues.

How it is that the mantilla, a particularly Spanish form of head covering, became the preferred head covering of traditional women in America in the twenty-first century is truly puzzling. 

By all means, cover your hair if you want to, or don't if you don't want to.  There are good arguments both for and against.  But I'm with the other Erin in wondering — why mantillas?  I mean, they are beautiful, but really, a bandanna would also do the trick, and if I decided to cover my hair for Mass, that's probably the route I'd take.   Or some kind of wicking performance fabric, more likely.

And then, the judgment I'd probably receive would be "Huh, guess she didn't have time to wash her hair this morning."