New: The Trump administration’s firing of Maurene Comey violated the separation of powers, rules a federal judge. Comey is entitled to back pay/reinstatement.

In the early 1900s, unescorted women frequently faced public harassment and street "mashers" on crowded sidewalks and streetcars, turning their long steel hatpins into effective close-range weapons. Self-defense guides even taught women how to combine hatpin stabs with jiu-jitsu. Because the protruding pins caused accidental injuries in crowded public spaces, cities like Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Milwaukee passed ordinances restricting hatpin lengths or requiring protective safety caps. . . . In the early 1900s, as cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco swelled with unescorted working women, harassment from so‑called “mashers” became a daily hazard. Women’s fashion unintentionally handed them a weapon: the six‑ to ten‑inch hatpin, originally meant to anchor enormous Edwardian hats. By 1903, newspapers were already reporting cases like Leoni Blaker in New York, who famously jabbed an aggressive older man on a streetcar. These incidents weren’t isolated,women across the United States, Britain, and Australia quickly realized that the hatpin gave them something society rarely did: a way to defend themselves. By 1910, the hatpin’s effectiveness had lawmakers scrambling. Cities from Chicago to Kansas City passed ordinances limiting hatpins to nine inches or requiring protective sheaths, citing “public safety.” Police often hesitated to enforce the rules, and women openly resisted, most dramatically in Sydney in 1912, when sixty women were jailed for refusing to pay fines for overlong hatpins. The debate over these tiny weapons became entangled with the growing women’s suffrage movement, symbolizing the fight for bodily autonomy and the right to move through public space without fear. The hatpin panic exposed deep anxieties about women’s growing independence. As more women entered public life, working, riding streetcars, shopping alone, hatpins became symbols of autonomy that unsettled male‑dominated city governments. Newspapers sensationalized “hatpin stabbings,” portraying women as dangerously empowered, while suffragists cleverly embraced the controversy to argue that if society feared women with a simple pin, it was really fearing women with power. #drthehistories