{"id":77857,"date":"2024-09-06T01:07:57","date_gmt":"2024-09-06T07:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/?p=77857"},"modified":"2024-09-06T01:07:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T07:07:57","slug":"improvised-weapons-history-the-humble-ladys-hatpin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/06\/improvised-weapons-history-the-humble-ladys-hatpin\/","title":{"rendered":"Improvised Weapons History: The Humble Lady’s Hatpin"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Before Mace, a Hatpin Was an Unescorted Lady\u2019s Best Defense<\/a><\/h1>\n

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There were once, among the\u00a0<\/span>rogues\u2019 gallery of men who harass women in public, disreputable fellows known as mashers. The masher took a lady\u2019s arm, the masher took liberties, the masher might, with the slightest provocation, take advantage. He approached a woman he did not know, to ask her to a dance or to ask if he hadn\u2019t met her somewhere before. The masher, above all,\u00a0the\u00a0Scranton Truth<\/em>\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0in 1914, was \u201cjust a plain cad \u2026 a coward, too, for he knows that an unescorted girl can only express her resentment by ignoring him.\u201d But women had another tool in their arsenal to swiftly prick and deflate the masher\u2019s inflated ego: the hatpin.<\/h2>\n

Between the late 1880s and the early 1920s, advertising was on the rise and increasingly targeting women. Among the alluring consumer goods pitched to them were hats: the more elaborate and precariously perched, the better. At the same time, women\u2019s hairstyles began to climb higher and higher. They grew their tresses long, then pinned them up, sometimes stuffing them with bits of false hair or cloth. This,\u00a0reported\u00a0The New York Times<\/em><\/a>, made it \u201cimpossible to fit a hat to a lady\u2019s crown.\u201d By 1901, fashionable hats had grown into towering monstrosities of taffeta, silk, ribbons, flowers real and fake, ostrich feathers, and even artificial fruit. Affixing these edifices to those hairstyles required stout hardware, sometimes of six, eight, even 10 inches in length. All the ingredients were there\u2014ridiculous hair, even sillier hat\u2014for a perfect hatpin storm.<\/h2>\n

This period also saw more women were walking alone or in unaccompanied groups, which some men found either morally affronting or desperately alluring. Unchaperoned women began to experience sexual harassment on the street or on public transportation more than ever before. But, for \u201cperhaps the only time in American history,\u201d writes Kerry Segrave, in\u00a0The Hatpin Menace: American Women Armed and Fashionable, 1887\u20131920<\/em>, \u201cvirtually all American women went out and about armed with a deadly (though legal) weapon.\u201d That weapon attached their hats to their hair\u2014and it was so effective that within a decade, proposed legislation to curb these accessories to assault had bubbled up across the United States.<\/h2>\n

RTWT<\/a><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Before Mace, a Hatpin Was an Unescorted Lady\u2019s Best Defense   There were once, among the\u00a0rogues\u2019 gallery of men who harass women in public, disreputable fellows known as mashers. The masher took a lady\u2019s arm, the masher took liberties, the masher might, with the slightest provocation, take advantage. He approached a woman he did not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[13,475,5064,478,479,6503,15334,2863],"tags":[8490,8866,376,17919,8378,8979],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77857"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77857"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77860,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77857\/revisions\/77860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}