This carefully posed photograph of a mother and her daughters in pseudo-Puritan clothing reveals more about early 20th century interests, concerns, and lack of knowledge of the past than it does about the lives of women and girls in colonial America. Many Americans at the turn of the 20th century had developed a newfound fascination with the people, customs, and objects from the 17th through the early 19th centuries. In the midst of industrialization, mass production, and urbanization, some people turned to imagining wistfully and romantically a past that they erroneously thought was a simpler, more intimate world.