Every origin story needs a first moment, and for the hatpin panic, popular memory has settled on Leoti Blaker's stagecoach ride. It's a good story — vivid, quotable, with a heroine who gave a great interview. But it isn't actually where the story starts.
More than a month before Blaker ever boarded that Fifth Avenue stage, a young woman named Mayme Andrews was walking home from her job at a department store in East St. Louis, Illinois. It was April 1903. A man she didn't recognize fell into step beside her. She ignored him and picked up her pace. He kept pace with her, moving close enough to nearly brush her arm.
She didn't scream. She didn't run. She reached up, drew a hatpin from her hat, and drove it into his shoulder — all before he realized what was happening. He yelled out in pain and bolted down the street.
Why you've never heard of her
The St. Louis Republic covered it in a short item on April 20, 1903, matter-of-fact in tone, more incident report than feature story. There was no follow-up interview, no memorable quote picked up by the wire services, no illustration. It ran, and then it was gone.
Compare that to what happened a month later. When Leoti Blaker did essentially the same thing on a New York stagecoach, the Evening World sent a reporter to track her down, ran a colorful narrative complete with dialogue, and gave her the space to explain herself in her own words. Blaker had all the ingredients for a story that travels: a scenic setting, a memorable quote, a named heroine willing to talk to the press. Andrews had none of that. She had a factual paragraph in a regional paper, and then silence.
Miss Andrews, as a last resort, reached into her hat and withdrew a big hatpin.
It's a pattern that shows up constantly in women's history: the "first" incident we remember is rarely the actual first. It's the first one a reporter decided was worth writing up with flair — the first one packaged for an audience. Andrews's story didn't spread not because it mattered less, but because nobody thought to make her a character.
It goes back further still
Even Andrews may not be the true starting point. Kerry Segrave's research turns up an 1898 incident in Chicago, where a young woman named Sadie Williams used her hatpin against a pair of streetcar robbers — not a masher, a different kind of danger, but the same instinct and the same object turned into a weapon in a moment of crisis. That story circulated too, in its own smaller way, years before anyone was talking about a "hatpin peril."
So depending on how narrowly you define the category — self-defense against harassment specifically, versus self-defense generally, versus which incident happened to get press coverage — you can point to several different "firsts." That's not a flaw in the record. It's the record telling us something true: women had been doing this quietly, quite possibly for years, before the press decided it was a trend worth naming.
Why this matters for the story we're telling
None of this is to take anything away from Blaker. Her write-up is genuinely the reason a regional annoyance turned into a national conversation, and that matters. But if this project is going to be honest about where the "hatpin peril" actually came from, it has to start with the recognition that the panic has an origin point — a specific magazine article, a specific reporter's choices — while the behavior it panicked about almost certainly doesn't. Women were already handling this. The press just hadn't noticed yet.