Several years ago, I made a pink pussy hat for a family member to wear to the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017. The pattern came from the Pussyhat Project as a repudiation of a president who bragged about grabbing women by the pussies.
(me modeling the hat before I sent it)
More recently, protesters in Minnesota have been wearing red knitted hats as symbols of resistance to the occupation of Minneapolis by ICE agents.
(image from Salon.com)
A knitting shop designed patterns by Ravelry based on a 1940s Norwegian design that people wore to protest the Nazi occupation of Norway. But red hats have a history of protest that stretches back to ancient times. In Phrygia, an ancient region of central Anatolia, part of modern Turkey, freed slaves wore pointy red hats to distinguish them from their enslaved peers. Phrygian caps, as they became known, continued to be worn as symbols of freedom from oppression into the 18th century, including by American and French revolutionaries.
(Detail from a French print from 1793 that uses the Liberty Cap as a motif of the First Republic via Wikimedia Commons)
Paul Revere incorporated the hat in carvings and engravings as a symbol of Libertas, but in a country riddled with chattel slavery, the hat became controversial among Americans in power. Plans to feature a Liberty Cap on a statue in 1854 were trashed by Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war (not long before he became president of the Confederacy), who said, “American liberty is original, and not the liberty of the freed slave.”
Vile. But a confederate asshole couldn’t stop the revolution nor the popularity of Liberty Hats. Contemporary drawings of the 1791 Haitian War of Independence, a successful uprising by enslaved African people, show revolutionaries wearing red Phrygian hats, and the hat is still featured on the Haitian Coat of Arms. See it up there at the top?
(Haitian Coat of Arms, Wikimedia Commons)
During the French Revolution, people exhausted by the greedy monarchy wore bonnets rouge in solidarity with the working classes, which became associated with Marianne, the French Lady of Liberty. As the Revolution morphed into the Reign of Terror, red hats became mandatory lest you lose your head to the guillotine. Later still, red hats were banned to protect the sad little egos of the new regime (which was also quickly overthrown).
(photo from Wikimedia Commons)
During the French Revolution, groups of women knitted countless red hats while watching the guillotine work its bloody business. Women + knitting + revolution makes me remember Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities, and in my next post I plan to do a deep dive into knitting as spycraft.
Until then, wear your red hats with pride! Make your own, or buy one here.