If A Woman Clears Her Throat In A Forest…

Good afternoon, my dears! It’s been a while since this site has seen some fresh chum, and I’m here to change that. I want to begin by saying that I’ll be running a smaller, lighter, more nimble craft over here to start (I am also editing The Awl!!). You might think I’m crazy, having my hands on two turntables like this, but how else are we going to find out, if I don’t try?

The Hairpin is an heirloom that has been handed down to me through microgenerations of intelligent young women, but it will always vibrate with the soul and energy of its founding editor, the incomparable Edith Zimmerman. My aim is to handle the ‘pin with the honor and reverence it deserves, while also letting it live a new life, make some new friends. Let’s you and I wear this thing out of the house and show it off, shall we? I’ll still be rotating in some of the old outfits — don’t be alarmed to see old posts mixed in with the new.

In the meantime, please enjoy this, The Best Use of a Hairpin in All of History, as paraphrased by Mary Beard in an excellent lecture worth reading (or listening to) in full, on the public voice of women:

In the course of the Roman civil wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, Marcus Tullius Cicero — the most powerful public speaker and debater in the Roman world, ever — was lynched. The hit-squad that took him out triumphantly brought his head and hands to Rome, and pinned them up, for all to see, on the speaker’s platform in the Forum. It was then, so the story went, that Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony, who had been the victim of some of Cicero’s most devastating polemics, went along to have a look. And when she saw those bits of him, she removed the pins from her hair and repeatedly stabbed them into the dead man’s tongue. It’s a disconcerting image of one of the defining articles of female adornment, the hairpin, used as a weapon against the very site of the production of male speech — a kind of reverse Philomela. 1

Pin on, playette.

1. (Philomela, of course, having been de-tongued by Tereus, King of Thrace, for angering and defying him after he raped her.)

Photo: Shutterstock.com