PUT A PIN IN IT
Great-Grandma traveled safely across the ocean from Scotland thanks to one. She gave one to Grandma when she went to work in the big, bad city of Wheeling, West Virginia. Grandma gave it to Mom when she started college.
For generations of women in my family, and many others, a big sharp hatpin was the best and most easily-concealed defensive weapon they could get.
A little background: women have been using various kinds of pins to hold their headdresses in place for centuries. Except for bonnets, most female toppers had to be held in place somehow.
So pins had been around for a very long time.
But they hadn’t been this big.
Early 20th century hats were absolutely enormous. They could easily be as wide as a woman’s shoulders and the brim, feathers, and flourishes could sweep several inches past the top of her head. That wonderful shot of Kate Winslet and her hat at the start of TITANIC is not an exaggeration for effect.
More, hats were heavy. The ones that weren’t tightly-woven straw were fabric stretched over a wire armature, and all were piled with embellishments, from wax fruit to a whole stuffed bird.
And the whole assembly had to rest on a big knot of slippery hair.
The only way to keep something that large in place was with an equally large pin. Size wasn’t enough, either. The pins had to be sharp enough to go through all the layers of fabric and hair to the other side.
They weren’t designed as weapons, but resourceful women quickly figured out that they made excellent ones.
A girl from Kansas made headlines when she fended off a “masher” on a Manhattan train in 1903. Newspapers in New York – and worldwide – loved it.
Soon enough, though, the heroine defending her virtue with a convenient weapon became the menacing suffragette deliberately threatening poor innocent men. The tales of maidenly self-defense gave way to lurid screeds about evil women randomly hat-pinning harmless straphangers in the brain.
Most are probably urban legends, but people use the weapons they have, after all, and there’s no doubt that women did resort to hat-pinnery on occasion. A crowd of hatpin-brandishing factory girls stopped NYPD officers from arresting a couple of their colleagues who were accused of being anarchists.
And then there’s the time a Chicago-area wife and her husband’s mistress dueled over him, with hatpins instead of pistols.
By 1910, Chicago banned hatpins over nine inches…and many other cities in the U.S. and overseas considered or passed similar measures – over the often loud objections of women. In Sydney, Australia, sixty women even went to jail instead of paying hatpin fines.
Of course, there was a lot of cultural subtext here. More than a few of the fellas (and they were all fellas!) who were grousing about hatpins also observed that women wouldn’t need defensive weapons if they’d stay home, dress modestly, and skip the rouge. Sound familiar?
World War I put an end to big hats and big hair, and most of the panic about hatpins. But plenty of women still kept them around, passed on from mother to daughter, because they really were a great security measure to have in your pocket or purse.
My pepper spray isn’t nearly as fun.
Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!
For generations of women in my family, and many others, a big sharp hatpin was the best and most easily-concealed defensive weapon they could get.
A little background: women have been using various kinds of pins to hold their headdresses in place for centuries. Except for bonnets, most female toppers had to be held in place somehow.
So pins had been around for a very long time.
But they hadn’t been this big.
Early 20th century hats were absolutely enormous. They could easily be as wide as a woman’s shoulders and the brim, feathers, and flourishes could sweep several inches past the top of her head. That wonderful shot of Kate Winslet and her hat at the start of TITANIC is not an exaggeration for effect.
More, hats were heavy. The ones that weren’t tightly-woven straw were fabric stretched over a wire armature, and all were piled with embellishments, from wax fruit to a whole stuffed bird.
And the whole assembly had to rest on a big knot of slippery hair.
The only way to keep something that large in place was with an equally large pin. Size wasn’t enough, either. The pins had to be sharp enough to go through all the layers of fabric and hair to the other side.
They weren’t designed as weapons, but resourceful women quickly figured out that they made excellent ones.
A girl from Kansas made headlines when she fended off a “masher” on a Manhattan train in 1903. Newspapers in New York – and worldwide – loved it.
Soon enough, though, the heroine defending her virtue with a convenient weapon became the menacing suffragette deliberately threatening poor innocent men. The tales of maidenly self-defense gave way to lurid screeds about evil women randomly hat-pinning harmless straphangers in the brain.
Most are probably urban legends, but people use the weapons they have, after all, and there’s no doubt that women did resort to hat-pinnery on occasion. A crowd of hatpin-brandishing factory girls stopped NYPD officers from arresting a couple of their colleagues who were accused of being anarchists.
And then there’s the time a Chicago-area wife and her husband’s mistress dueled over him, with hatpins instead of pistols.
By 1910, Chicago banned hatpins over nine inches…and many other cities in the U.S. and overseas considered or passed similar measures – over the often loud objections of women. In Sydney, Australia, sixty women even went to jail instead of paying hatpin fines.
Of course, there was a lot of cultural subtext here. More than a few of the fellas (and they were all fellas!) who were grousing about hatpins also observed that women wouldn’t need defensive weapons if they’d stay home, dress modestly, and skip the rouge. Sound familiar?
World War I put an end to big hats and big hair, and most of the panic about hatpins. But plenty of women still kept them around, passed on from mother to daughter, because they really were a great security measure to have in your pocket or purse.
My pepper spray isn’t nearly as fun.
Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!
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