On blogs scattered across the Internet there are tales told of the plucky and resourceful Victorian women who would fight off the unwanted attentions of ‘mashers’ with their hatpins. While these individual anecdotes are true, the greater truth is one more nuanced, sitting within the changing position of women in society.
The Collector’s Companion has taken a deep dive into hatpins, it’s sister in stabbing – the hairpin, hats, hysteria, crime and punishment and the fight for women’s rights.
A NEW ERA IN DOMESTIC WARFARE
The new year of 1875 was rung in with an ‘extraordinary assault’ in a Lancashire beer house making the headlines, in which ‘three or four hairpins’ were ‘fastened in an ingenious fashion’ between the fingers of a woman and used to stab another woman in the face, several times. The newspaper declared the assault as marking ‘a new era in the annals of domestic and social warfare. The hairpin for the first time has been brought into use as an extempore knuckleduster, and … will, no doubt, make many a Lancashire husband tremble in his wooden shoes.’
The headline wasn’t entirely true. Prior to this there had been a few brief mentions (perhaps more, but not many have been digitised) of hatpin/hairpin attacks taking place in the papers, but it was correct in predicting the trembling of husbands as the war on women and their pins would begin before the end of the century.
The 1870s marked a change in headwear for women. Prior to then women had mostly worn bonnets, fastened around the chin, but by 1874 Harpers Bazar was reporting that, ‘strings are seldom seen, and this does away with the last distinguishing feature between bonnets and round hats.’
Over the next twenty years or so there was a smattering of pin attacks, most which paint a picture similar to a town centre on a Saturday night. Wild working class women, grab their hatpins and lunge at lodging-house keepers, or other women over petty squabbles. Sometimes a dedicated police constable will be on the receiving end of their ire. In one 1888 report it was judged that, “such hairpins are most convenient weapons, and the practice of using them in street or domestic brawls is likely to grow with a few proofs of their efficacy.”
It wasn’t uncommon in these early cases for women claim self defence, from an abusive husband or from attack by a man in the street. What was noticeable in crime/court reports is that such defences were very quickly dismissed as being entirely made up. Laws to acknowledge and protect women from violence were fairly new and would not extend to the lower classes. Women’s punishments (for being drunk and disorderly, and/or assault) tended to be around a month’s hard labour.
It is worth reminding at this point, that the late 1800s were the dizzy heights of the hysterical woman. In 1859, physician George Taylor claimed that a quarter of women suffered from hysteria, the nervous disease that in 1880 newspapers described as having a “recent rapid spread”, in a tone not dissimilar to modern reports on the emergence of Corona virus. “Tendency to cause trouble” was one of the almost endless list of symptoms. Women were unpredictable and unreliable.
Hairpins, and women, weren’t all bad though. Providing they were well-kept women, they could do all sorts of clever things with their hairpins to make themselves useful, and the newspapers published these hairpin hacks musing at what the Mrs could put her pretty little head to with her fair fingers, be it opening an envelope, buttoning a glove or (and this, apparently, the most important use) cleaning a smoker’s pipe.
DRAW HATPINS AND CHARGE
Towards the end of 1897 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage (non-militants) was formed following mergers of multiple regional societies. 1903 saw the creation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the militants), with militant acts taking place from 1905. It was no longer just the lower classes making a nuisance of themselves, but all women.
As one century drew to a close and the next began, the stream of hatpin-themed news reports continued. Attack, peril, deadly, stabbed, dangers – near identical headlines were endlessly repeated (as demonstrated by the side panels on these pages), except now they were interspersed with letters/editorials from angry men becrying the “dangerous instrument” and the women so “totally devoid of social conscience”.
One man, in 1904, proclaimed that “the influence of the hatpin upon the marriage market must be considerable, and the number of pining spinsters roaming around in search of husbands to-day on account of it must be stupendous.” Another man, in 1912, spoke of the “absurdities of women’s dress”, that they disguise themselves “as a contestant in a fancy-dress sack race” with hats which “suggest a small tent”. Another mused, in 1897, that it was no use suggesting smaller hatpins (with a 10” unnecessary on only 4” of hair) as “what lady is going to admit that her bunch of hair is only four inches in diameter?” Melbourne’s City Council, in 1914, discussed the legalities of hatpins alongside “strong comments” on women’s dress, “declaring that it was conducive to pneumonia and immorality.”
This isn’t to say that the men didn’t have some justification for their complaints. Hats, and therefore hatpins, were growing in size.
The pre-1870s bonnets were replaced with small, perching hats. Hair was worn down in rolls, or half-down, which allowed for a string of elastic under the hair to secure the hat. Then, hats and hair grew bigger. Hair, with several ‘rats’ or pads was worn up and hats were placed on top with increasingly more elaborate trimmings, which could include entire (dead) birds. Now, several hatpins thrust through the crown and pile of hair were required to ensure nothing would take flight. It was only the period of a few years, peaking in 1911, when hats were truly ridiculous in size, requiring substantial hatpins to make it through the wide crown and out the other side.
YOU WOMEN WITH THE SILLY HATPIN
There were accidents on public transport. On a packed omnibus a bump in the road could, and on more than one occasion did, result in an unsheathed hatpin being thrust into an unsuspecting man’s eye. Such incidents led to an influx of laws and regulations across the Western hat-wearing world. In some cases the laws required hatpins to have the point protected, in other cases it was the length of hatpin that was limited. Although such laws seem entirely reasonable, they were the cause of protest and in many cases ignored. Following Budapest’s ordinance of 1911, 1,236 women were stopped by police in one week alone. In Sydney, Australia, sixty women were arrested for “protruding hatpins” and threatened a hunger strike.
For many women, it wasn’t about the safety of men, (and as some pointed out, “accidents from [hatpins] are very rare, especially when you consider that practically every woman in England uses them”), but the safety of women. Upon debating the introduction of a hatpin ordinance in Chicago in 1910, a petition of women was read by the city clerk asking, “in the name of thousands of ladies who are obliged occasionally to walk home in the night-time,” liberty to carry hatpins uncurtailed. “We are not allowed to use revolvers,” the petition read. “Hatpins are our only means of defence. Nothing excels a stout hatpin as an effective weapon. Thousands of us, when leaving a tramway-car, hold a hatpin in our hand until we are safe indoors.”
The control of hatpins could be argued to be intended as a useful method of reminding women who was in charge. It was flippantly suggested that “before woman makes too strenuous a fight for suffrage she should invent hats that will stay put.” Or less flippantly, “how can men give the vote to those who are so selfishly forgetful of what is due in others? How can a larger voice in the management of the State be given to women when, in the small things of life, such as that of unprotected hatpins, they show themselves so criminally thoughtless?”
The use of hatpins to supress the right to vote was clearly something women were aware of. A Mrs Snowden, speaking to the Blackburn branch of the Independent Labour party following a tour of the US, gave examples of women, in multiple States, who had gotten the vote and had immediately used their new found power to pass measures prohibiting dangerous hatpins. She contended that “the granting of the vote to women, who by their natures valued human life more than property, would be all for the public good.”
HATPINS AS CLUES
Cementing the link between dangerous hatpins and dangerous women were a handful of instances of Suffragette militancy, of which the two most notable took place in 1913. The first was the February bombing of David Lloyd George’s (Chancellor of the Exchequer and soon to be PM) house. The only clues left by the bombers were two broken hat-pins! The second was the “stubborn resistance” police were met with upon arresting Emmeline Pankhurst that July, when the “maddened women tried to rush the door. Screaming and shouting, they hurled themselves at the police. Umbrellas were smashed over the officers’ heads; hats, coats and dresses were torn; blood flowed freely.” And then the closing line, “hatpins were used for purposes of attack.”
Unsurprisingly, the war on hatpins fizzled out when the real war started in 1914 and in the following years close-fitting hats (most famously, the cloche) became the fashion for newly emancipated women.
That’s not to say hatpin attacks came to an end, they didn’t. There are occasional cases even in the 1960s and 70s, but without a big hat for cover, the excuse for carrying these convenient weapons had come to an end.
