Victorian Self-Defense Fun: Women Used to Stab Men With Their Hatpins

We’ve all been there, ladies. Walking home, keys between knuckles, hand hovering over pepper spray in purse, doing mental calculations of the distance to the nearest corner store. But what if I told you that Victorian women had a method of self-defense that might just be superior to our go-tos today? And what if I told you that solution was … hatpins?

As the San Francisco Examiner reported in August 1895: “The hatpin in the hands of a determined woman has long been known as a most formidable instrument of attack and defense.”

Now, you might be wondering how much damage can really be wrought with a pin? Turns out, quite a bit! That’s because in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the average hat pin was 8 inches long. Some ran to as long as 12 inches. Every woman on the street used them daily as a means of keeping in place the elaborate and heavy headwear that was fashionable at the time. And also, clearly, stabbing handsy bedswervers and mashers* as and when necessary.

[*“Bedswerver” was Victorian for “f–k boi,” and “masher” was a term used for sexual harassers . Let’s bring them back!]

In 1895, the San Francisco Examiner reported on an incident where a stenographer named Jennie Ryan had been stalked by a young attorney. One night, faced with relentless advances from him, she stabbed him with her hatpin. The young man was subsequently “arrested for sending insulting letters to Miss Ryan.”

In 1900, a Salinas caterer named Joseph Lial had been sharing his amorous intentions with “a certain woman of the Tenderloin, as well as others,” according to a report in the San Francisco Call Bulletin. On March 23 that year, Lial and his girlfriend got into an altercation over the matter.

“The man became angry and vindictive,” the newspaper reported. “A struggle ensued. The woman, being unarmed, took a steel hatpin from her headgear and drove it deep into the leg of her assailant. The pin punctured an artery and in a very short time he had lost a great quantity of blood.”

Lial survived thanks to fast medical intervention, “but refused to say anything of the affair for some time.”

Most remarkably of all, the hatpin as a man repellant occasionally turned women into full-blown crime fighters. In March 1898, a young woman from Chicago named Sadie Williams found herself witness to the robbery of a streetcar conductor. The Examiner reported that Williams foiled the theft singlehandedly — “and she did it with her little hatpin.”

The newspaper explained: “One of the robbers, when he felt the bare bodkin jabbed into his leg, turned and struck Miss Williams, but she came at him again, prodded him in the neck, pricked him in the face and stabbed him under the fifth rib until he squealed and ran.” The newspaper concluded: “It was a glorious victory.”

By the end of the century, commentary in Bay Area newspapers showed support for women defending themselves with hatpins, but asked that they not employ any additional means. In February 1899, after one woman threw red pepper into the eyes of a man before attempting to jab him with her hatpin, one Examiner reporter argued:

“Now this was distinctly unfair … He has no chance to run. He has been imposed upon. If he were to try to escape he might slump into a coal-hole or skurry kerplunk from the dock. Is it too much to ask that lovely woman satisfy her yearning with a hatpin alone and leave the pepper at home to be employed in the field of cookery? If she persist in her reckless course, the first thing she knows, those Sacramento legislators will abolish the hatpin and decree that its place be taken by a ribbon.”

The reporter, it turns out, had a point (pun intended). The following year, legislators in New York argued that hatpins should not exceed three inches because of the physical damage they were doing to men across the nation. In March 1900, Examiner reporter Lillian Ferguson responded in her Sunday column that such legislation was an affront to women everywhere.

“Fancy trying to keep one’s hat on straight with three inches of pin! … More than ever does the San Francisco woman whose employment compels her to be on the street after midnight — and I am of the number — need every six inches of her hatpin. En route from the care homeward these black nights, when every lamp post has failed her, what weapon has she against attack but the one that is sheathed in her hat?”

She continued: “[The] statement that men’s lives are imperiled by the presence of hatpins, because of a few isolated instances in which they … puncture the vital organs of man is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. More men have been brained by rolling pins and battered by pokes than have been injured by hatpins.”

Despite hatpin-length restrictions introduced in cities like Seattle, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Brooklyn and Colorado Springs, Bay Area women were permitted to do whatever they pleased with their headwear. In 1904, the San Francisco Call Bulletin went so far as to include a pictorial of how best to utilize hatpins against aggressors.

The following images were included in the article, titled How to Defend Yourself.

The image on the left was captioned: “When attacked from behind, she grasps her hat pin turning quickly.” The one on the right was accompanied by: “She is able to strike a fatal blow in the face.”

Amen to that.