. . . is what you'll want to do when you see this unusual collection of antique hatpins and holders currently in our trove.
Beginning in the 1870s, fashionable women's headgear went from bonnets and hats tied in place with ribbons to charming small chapeaus that perched atop the head. To keep the hat in place, it was typically pinned to the hair. However, as the 1800s passed into the early 1900s, hats became ever larger and more elaborate, as did the hair underneath, with buns, chignons, rolls, and "rats." Hatpins consequently grew in length, some 12 inches or longer. The pins become as much an accessory as the hat, often with decorative tops. To keep her pins in place, a woman needed a hatpin holder (sometimes several). These functional and decorative hatpin holders were made by porcelain manufacturers in Europe, the United States, and Japan, in a wide variety of shapes and colors.
In the 1907 English adaptation of Franz Lehár’s comic operetta, Die Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), actress and singer Lily Elsie, starring as the wealthy widow Hanna Glawari, wore a oversized wide-brim hat frothy with chiffon and feathers. Such sumptuous super-sized Merry Widow hats, festooned with feather, flowers, and sometimes even entire birds, became a fashionable fad.
The hatpins also served another purpose. . . protection. As the Victorian era passed into the Edwardian, it became more acceptable for women to go out unescorted, whether to work, lunch, or shop. A young woman traveling alone on public transport could became a target of a "masher," the term for male stranger making unwanted and persistent advances to a woman. However, by pulling out and flourishing her hatpin, the young lady could literally make her point that she wanted to be left in peace. As a music hall ditty of the period advised women,
Never go walking out without your hat pin.
The law won’t let you carry more than that.
For if you go walking out without your hat pin,
You may lose your head as well as lose your hat.
Never go walking out without your hat pin.
Not even to some very classy joints.
For when a fellow sees you’ve got a hat pin
He’s very much more apt to get the point.
However such huge hats, and their associated pins, had their many detractors. Theaters, movies houses, and even churches, began to request that women remove their hats so not to block the view of other patrons or parishioners. There were complaints that bystanders were being poked in the eye by hat brims or pricked by protruding pins on crowded streets or trolley cars. Cities even passed ordinances trying to regulate the length of hatpins.
However, on a more serious level, decorating these hats required the murder and mutilation of millions of birds from all over the world (although it often goes unmentioned that the increased demand for exotic and rare feathers for the male hobby of fishing fly tying also played its part the the decimation of bird populations, but then men generally did not go out in public wearing their fishing flies on top of their heads). In 1896, Harriet Hemenway and her cousin, Minna Hall, founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society to call attention to the needless massacre of birds and to halt the fashion for feathers. The National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals (now the National Audubon Society) was incorporated in 1905. Following lobbying by Audubon members, naturalists, and environmentalists, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was enacted in 1918, making it illegal to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, possess, sell, purchase, barter, import, export, or transport any migratory bird. Also, by the late 1910s, women's fashions were changing to a similar, more columnar silhouette with shorter hair and more close-fitting headgear like turbans and cloches that did not need to be pinned in place. Although elaborate elongated hatpin subsequently passed out of fashion, these pins and their porcelain holders are now popular collectibles.
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