On the evening of Saturday, April 3, 1909, Wilma Berger left Chicago's Henrotin Hospital, at LaSalle Avenue and Oak Street, and walked toward the lake. She was 20, a probation nurse who had been on the staff for about a week and hardly knew anyone there, so she went alone. On Ontario Street, near Lake Shore Drive, a man knocked her down with a blow to the head, knelt on her, and squeezed her throat with one hand while he pushed the other into her mouth to keep her from screaming.

Berger decided he was too strong to wrestle. She had studied jiu-jitsu, and one of its lessons, she explained afterward, was to yield when overpowered and wait for the attacker to relax. She stopped struggling and asked to get up and wipe the dirt off her face. He took out his own handkerchief and began wiping it for her. She caught his sleeves, pulled his arms down and tripped him. When he got up, she threw him again and ran until she found a policeman on State Street. Her hat, her watch and her combs were found later where she had fallen. Her only injury was a sprained thumb.

What she told the reporters

At the East Chicago Avenue police station, Berger showed how she had done it. She tossed a couple of reporters "like children" and nearly floored Detective Frank Gard, who stood over six feet and weighed 200 pounds. The papers learned that she had studied under Tomita Tsunejiro, one of the Japanese instructors then teaching in New York, and had taught women in Colorado Springs.

The Chicago papers never settled on what to call her attacker. He was a masher in one headline, a footpad, a robber or a ruffian in others. Berger was clearer about the point. "Police can't protect me from ruffians, but I can protect myself," she told the Inter Ocean. She wished philanthropists would spend less on libraries and more on teaching girls jiu-jitsu, so that mothers would not be afraid to let their daughters out alone at night.

Eleven months later, Chicago's city council voted 68 to 2 to limit the length of women's hatpins.

A large class in Washington

Berger was not unusual, only well reported. Jiu-jitsu had become a fashion by 1904, the year President Roosevelt took lessons at the White House from Yoshitsugu Yamashita, a teacher sent from Tokyo. A report from Washington, printed in the Indianapolis Journal that March, described the President's sessions on the mat in his office. Its last sentence was about a woman traveling with the Japanese party, also an expert. Other sources identify her as Fude Yamashita, the teacher's wife. She was teaching a large class of Washington society women, the report said,

"whose husbands are in a panic."

The stories of women using what they learned kept coming. In October 1905, Emelie Marten stepped off a trolley at Flushing Road on Long Island and started walking home. A man who had been following her passed her, turned, lifted his hat and winked. According to the New York Times, she took his coat lapel in one hand and his wrist in the other and threw him. He got up, tried to say something, went down a second time, and ran.

Ladylike

Boxing had reached women earlier, and so had the worry. As early as 1892, a New York World story reprinted in the St. Paul Daily Globe described New York women taking boxing lessons in private, their instructors too discreet to give names. The women, it said, had no plans for the ring. Then it added: "Prospective husbands had better beware." The article ended by reassuring readers that the lessons repaid women in beauty, leaving them straight-backed and supple.

Even approval came with a qualification. In September 1911, the Seattle Star asked the city's mayor, George Dilling, and its police chief, Claude Bannick, what a woman should do when a masher spoke to her. Dilling said she was justified in punching him on the jaw, though he began with a concession: "It may seem rather unladylike for a woman to strike a man." Bannick preferred that she follow the man until she found a policeman, but said he would applaud her for hitting him instead.

Other men

In each of these stories the danger was a man on the street. Berger was struck down in the dark. Marten was followed home. Yet when the papers turned from the incidents to the women who were learning to answer them, the concern was mostly about other men. A class of society wives became a panic among their husbands. Boxing lessons became a warning to future husbands, softened by a promise about posture. A punch for a masher was justified, and also unladylike.

Chicago's council had answered the hatpin with a rule about the pin, and none about the men it was used against. A woman who could throw a man over her shoulder needed no pin at all. The questions still came back to her: her husband, her figure, her manners.

The next essay asks why that turn keeps coming back, long after the hatpins came out of women's hats.