The report ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday, November 2, 1913, under a Wilkes-Barre dateline. City Councils there, split like Philadelphia's into a Common branch and a Select branch, had been working on a resolution to ban unguarded hatpins and require every point to be covered, to protect people on crowded streets and streetcars. The Common branch passed it. When the Select branch took it up, the acting clerk of Council was Emma Schwager, who normally worked in the office of City Clerk Fred Gates.
According to the Inquirer, Schwager made no attempt to sway the vote. The councilmen asked for her views anyway, and then someone suggested that she cast the Select branch's vote herself. Everyone agreed. "The vote is not concurred in," Schwager said, and with that the resolution was dead.
Emma Schwager had no vote in Wilkes-Barre's city elections. Pennsylvania women would not get one until the Nineteenth Amendment, seven years later. In Chicago, more than three years earlier, Nan Davis had been allowed to speak against her city's hatpin ordinance but not to vote on it. In Wilkes-Barre, a woman was handed the vote itself, and she used it to say no. Only the Inquirer's short item has turned up so far. It doesn't say whether the councilmen meant the gesture seriously or as a bit of fun, or whether the city ever took up the question again.
Philadelphia, 1910
Wilkes-Barre wasn't the first Pennsylvania council to back away from a hatpin bill. On Thursday, December 1, 1910, Select Councilman Nicholas J. Schmucker of Philadelphia's Twenty-fourth Ward rose to introduce one. The Inquirer noted that he hadn't taken the floor once since his election in 1907. He told the council that within the past week an acquaintance had been wounded in the eye by a hatpin while riding in an elevator, and was likely to lose his sight. He expected the measure to be unpopular with women, he said, but he was satisfied that "the sensible ones will appreciate its necessity."
Ten days later, the paper reported that the Committee on Law would take up the bill that Thursday, and that Schmucker saw every sign it would pass. No objections had been raised. Some of the city's most prominent women, the paper added, had announced that they favored it.
Then it died. A short wire item, reprinted in Indiana's Plymouth Tribune on December 22, reported that the committee had given way to a storm of protest from women and postponed the bill indefinitely. The opposition was led by Common Councilman Alfred Gratz, whose objection the item summed up in a single line.
"…the measure would deprive woman of her sole weapon of defense."
Those are the reporter's words, not Gratz's, and no fuller account of what he said has been found. But the two sides are clear enough. Schmucker called the long hatpin a public nuisance. Gratz called it a woman's defense. Philadelphia's women, for their part, turned up on both sides. An indefinite postponement isn't the same as a final defeat, but no sign of a later Philadelphia hatpin ordinance has surfaced.
St. Louis and Los Angeles
A 1913 roundup in the Municipal Journal, a trade paper for city officials, recorded two more. In St. Louis, a bill limiting a hatpin's exposed point to six inches, twelve times what Chicago allowed, passed one branch of the Municipal Assembly and lost in the other. Its opponents, the journal said, had dismissed it as "freak" legislation. Los Angeles nearly adopted a penalty as steep as Nevada's: up to $500, six months in jail, or both, for a pin more than an inch past the crown. The council tabled it at the last moment, after local jewelers had already ordered several thousand hatpin guards. The journal doesn't say when either vote happened.
Passed or not, the same question
The failed bills died in different ways: a split assembly, a committee facing a protest, a clerk handed a vote. What they share with the laws that passed is the question they were built around. Every bill in this exhibit, passed or not, was about the pin. Even Gratz, the one official on record in these accounts defending women's hatpins, defended them as something women needed for protection. Neither his objection nor any bill found for this essay took up what they needed protection from.
While councils were still arguing, changing styles were doing more to retire the hatpin than any law. By 1911, the San Francisco Call noted that hat fashion was shifting. The impulse behind the ordinances did not shift with it. Within about a decade it had found a new target, in girls, and clubs formed specifically to police how they behaved in public. That's next.