On the afternoon of May 27, 1903, a young woman from Kansas boarded a Fifth Avenue stagecoach at 23rd Street and did something that would make her, briefly, one of the most talked-about women in New York.
Her name was Leoti Blaker. She was visiting the city for a few days, and by her own account she'd barely settled into her seat before she noticed the man beside her — older, well-dressed, "benevolent-looking" by her own assessment — sitting closer than the crowded coach required. When the stage lurched over the cobblestones, passengers were thrown together the way they always are on a packed public vehicle. But this man didn't right himself and pull back. He stayed pressed against her, and then let his arm come to rest low across her back.
Blaker didn't ask him to stop. She didn't call for help. She reached up, pulled a hatpin from beneath her hat, and drove it into his arm as hard as she could.
The man let out a scream loud enough to startle the whole coach. He got up, said nothing, and left at the next corner. Blaker, for her part, kept looking calmly straight ahead the entire time; so much so that none of the other passengers understood what had happened until it was over.
What she actually said
A reporter from The Evening World caught up with Blaker soon after, and the resulting article — sensational even by the standards of 1903 news copy — turned her into a minor celebrity. Asked why she'd done it, she didn't hedge:
"If New York women will tolerate mashing, Kansas girls will not."
("Masher" was the period's word for a man who harassed women in public — leering, crowding, "accidentally" touching. It shows up constantly in newspapers of this era, almost always aimed at describing a nuisance rather than a crime.)
Blaker went on to explain that she'd simply reached her limit — that she'd tried ignoring him, and when that failed, she acted. She wasn't shy about defending the method, either. She told the reporter she intended to keep a spare hatpin on hand from then on, and encouraged other women to do the same.
What's remarkable, reading the coverage now, is the tone. This wasn't written as a cautionary tale or a scandal. It was written as a win — a story about a resourceful young woman handling a threat competently, on her own, without waiting for a man to intervene. The press treated her as a hero. That framing wouldn't last.
Why this incident, and why first
Blaker's stagecoach ride is usually cited as the origin point of what became known as the "hatpin peril" — although, as the next essay in this collection covers, she likely wasn't the first woman to use a hatpin this way, just the first to get a write-up wire services picked up nationally. That's part of why she matters here: the "first" incident in popular memory is often really the first reported incident, and the difference between those two things says a lot about how history gets written.
For the next few years, similar stories multiplied. Women defending themselves with hatpins on streetcars, in department stores, on city sidewalks. For a while, they were treated the way Blaker was: as evidence that women could look after themselves in public without a chaperone, without permission, without apology.
Then, gradually, the story that got told about the hatpin started to change. The weapon that had made mashers scream started to look, in print, less like a woman's reasonable answer to harassment and more like a menace in its own right. That shift — and how deliberately it was constructed — is where this collection goes next.