Topic 10: Hairpins

Carol:

A History of “Hairpins"

It is a typical Friday at the Edwards home near Pearl and Beekman streets in Brooklyn Ward 23. On May 19, 1902, all but one of the six Edwards “girls” still lives here with their widowed mother, along with several Olssen relatives and a boarder or two. From Helen, the oldest at 34, down to Estelle, 17, they wear their hair in the romantic fashion of the day: long and swirled up into soft buns, tresses held in place by numerous combs and pins. They congregate in the kitchen and talk as they prepare another meal for a dozen.

Daughter Emma Edwards circa 1900

Tonight, they listen while they work as Estelle reads aloud from the New York Sun, America’s first penny newspaper. Although the Sun features plenty of news articles, for reading out loud they prefer the lighter pieces. Aha, just the topic to give the Edwards ladies a good chuckle, “Hairpins.” They laugh, one mentally counting the pins in her hair, another quickly pushing back a stray curl. Estelle lingers over a particular paragraph. What can a woman do with a hairpin in 1902? She can

“fix a horse’s harness, restore damaged mechanical toys, wrestle with refactory beer stoppers, improvise suspenders, shovel bonbons, saw cake, jab tramps…. In fact, she can do what she wants to; she needs no other instrument” (215).

It is now 1915, and an eager group of young men are huddled in a classroom of the Columbia University School of Journalism in uptown Manhattan. The School of Journalism exists because of a major bequest of one of the great names in American writing, Joseph Pullitzer, and these future writers are eager to show the world that they represent the values of Pullitzer, himself a writer and publisher of the New York World, which had merged in 1910 with the Sun. Although the World had a reputation for sensationalism, Pullitzer had a grander, idealistic vision of the role of journalism:

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. … The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generation (source: Columbia University School of Journalism website )

These future journalists, some of whom would all too quickly earn their reputations covering world wars, the crash of Wall Street and the recession, were probably given a textbook published that very year by their own professors William Cunliffe and Gerhard Richard Lomer entitled Writing of Today: Models of Journalistic Prose. “Young gentlemen, before you go out into the world to 'mould the future of the Republic,' please turn to page 214 in your books and read today’s journalistic model, taken from the May 19, 1902 Sun. Its title? “Hairpins.”

Sources: Writing of today: models of journalistic prose edited by John William Cunliffe, Gerhard Richard Lomer



Megan:

What is there really to say about hairpins? I always thought they were called Bobby Pins, but maybe that’s like facial tissue and Kleenex. I care so little that I’m not going to bother looking it up. Anyway last night, I sent my mom this essay I found on Hairpins, which I thought, was clever and funny and then she totally stole it for her essay. So, I’m not going to do that again. I’m not here to write your essays for you, Mom. I can’t even write my own.

Maybe she stole my idea

(I call it an idea, but it was more like this:
‘Hey look what I found! ‘
‘Great, I’ll take it! ‘
‘Wait… what?’)

because I always steal her hairpins. But I didn’t think she knew about that… I never use them on my hair, because I have barrettes and hairclips and covered rubber bands and ten billion other doodads I can use on my hair. Her hairpins are too big anyway and my hair rejects them. They work their way out of my hair until they are projecting like the little antennae on the 3-eyed alien creatures from Toy Story.



So, I use her hairpins mainly to clean under my fingernails and to pick locks. In fact, just the other day I locked myself out of my bedroom because I’d hung my purse on the doorknob (something she warned me about). But I wasn’t worried because I knew just what to do!