On Sunday, April 3, 1910, a circus rider named Maud Rollins was leaving Chicago's LaSalle Street railroad station when she bumped into John F. Slater, a railroad fireman from Baraboo, Wisconsin. Her hatpin, as one Iowa paper described it, stuck out "like a mail catching arm of a railway postal car." It caught Slater on the cheek.
The two argued loudly enough that detectives stepped in, and it was Rollins they arrested. She was taken before a municipal judge named Gemmill and fined $1 and costs. Chicago's council had passed its hatpin ordinance only weeks earlier, with fines of up to $50, and the wire story that carried her name into papers in Iowa and Illinois called her the first woman arrested under it.
Chicago's was the loudest hatpin fight, but it was not the last. Over the next three years, councils and legislatures from Philadelphia to Seattle took up the same question, and a surprising amount of what they wrote down survives.
The same sentence, city to city
The clearest sign of how the idea spread is the wording itself. Chicago's ordinance, as the New York Times printed it in March 1910, applied on the street, in a streetcar or elevated car, and in any public elevator, and it barred a hatpin whose exposed point stuck out more than half an inch past the crown of the hat. When Select Councilman Nicholas J. Schmucker introduced a hatpin bill in Philadelphia that December, its first section repeated Chicago's sentence almost word for word, down to the list of places and the half inch. It dropped one thing: Chicago's exception for a covered point. Milwaukee's ordinance, signed in 1913, used the same sentence again and restored the exception for any pin fitted with "a suitable and effective guard."
The idea didn't have to be reinvented in each city. The text traveled with it.
Kansas City took its own route to the same place. In December 1910, its aldermen passed an ordinance requiring women to cover the points of their hatpins. Mayor Darius A. Brown vetoed it, and the aldermen overrode him. His reasons haven't turned up in anything found for this essay.
A dollar to six months
Where the laws differed was in the details, and a trade paper for city officials, the Municipal Journal, recorded many of them as they passed. In Milwaukee, Mayor G. A. Bading signed the ordinance with a fine of $1 an offense for the first three, and three days in jail after that, and the chief of police told his men to arrest any violator they found in public. New Orleans allowed no point beyond the hat at all unless it was covered, with fines of $1 to $10 or six hours to five days in jail, and its police were given special instructions to make arrests. In Massachusetts, Governor Eugene Foss signed a state law under which women whose points were uncovered after April 7, 1913, faced fines of up to $100. (Accounts differ on whether it also set a length limit.) Nevada's state law, in effect from January 1, 1912, went furthest: up to $500 and six months in jail.
Seattle's ordinance was more lenient about length, allowing a point to extend an inch and a quarter beyond the crown, though never past the brim. Its penalty was stiffer than Chicago's, at up to $100 or 30 days. It also had an unusual origin. The council passed it unanimously at the request of the city's Federation of Women's Clubs, the same kind of organization Nan Davis had represented when she stood up in Chicago to argue against that city's ordinance.
How often any of these laws was enforced is harder to say. In the United States, Maud Rollins's arrest is the only one found for this essay. In Indianapolis, which had adopted the same half-inch-unless-covered rule, an attorney supervising a codification of the city's laws told the Indianapolis Times in December 1937 that police had never made an arrest under it. The fine was $5 or less, he said, and a woman who wanted to be fully law-abiding could simply cap her pin with a point protector.
What every version targeted
Put side by side, the laws changed shape from place to place. The limit was half an inch in one city, an inch and a quarter in another, and in others no length at all, only a covered tip. The penalty ran from a dollar to six months in jail. The target never changed. Every version regulated the pin: how far it stuck out, whether its point was covered, and what the woman wearing it would pay. None of the ordinance texts or summaries found for this essay contains a word about the harassment women had been using hatpins to answer.
Not every council went along, though. In Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Wilkes-Barre, hatpin bills stalled or died, and in one of those rooms the deciding vote was cast by a woman. That's next.