The Fort Dodge Messenger: March 20, 1905

Annual Argument on Hats Arrives

Spring Season opens and Spring Hats Must Soon Be Bought.

The Cost is Evenly Divided

Styles in Women’s Hats are Rapidly Conforming with Those Practiced by Men’s Hatters and the Tailored Hat is the Proper Thing.

A season of the year is soon to delight the feminine part of Fort Dodge although it may counteract its effects by the reception it receives among the opposite sex, and the coming season is that of the spring openings in the numerous millinery stores of the city.

Then it is that the annual joke maker will begin to please one sex with the annual jokes about big hats and if he runs out of jokes about the big hats, he will make some up about enormous prices on small ones, so that it is easily to be seen he is hard to satisfy.

In reality if everyone will be honest, they will admit that all the fuss about high priced hats is concocted just for the convenience of the joke man and that although a woman does sometimes spend a good price for a hat she either wears it several seasons or does not have any other during that season.

Times are fast changing and styles in hats are advancing as rapidly as they are in other lines. The tailored hat a few years ago was unknown in the realm of bonnetdom, and no woman now is properly dressed for the street or for church unless she wears one, and any other style in the above named places would be as incongruous as a man wearing an opera hat to his business.

In the average walks of life a man pays nothing less than five dollars for his every day hat and if statistics were obtained it would be found that the women who pay more than that for their street hats are balanced on the other side by the man who pays more than five for his.

Then a man generally buys a straw hat of greater or less price for summer wear, and that corresponds to the dress hat that a woman buys for the garden party, and the evening party or reception and even should the masculine readers of this article contend that the woman’s hat costs more, he must remember that she can take off the plumes and other trimmings and put them away to help out with next year’s hat, and that a man’s hat, once discarded, leaves no trimmings for next years.

When you advance into the more prosperous and wealthy circles prices and numbers of hats, in both masculine and feminine wardrobes, or perhaps it should be wardhats, will increase proportionately.

As we said in the beginning, the spring season is soon to open, the usual creations will be shown and the usual woman will go home with the usual bonnet which she has decided upon after looking longingly at the more expensive one which fit her taste but not her purse, and in the usual way she will try to convince herself that the one she got is much more becoming and appropriate after all.

And just because she can monage (sic) to get a few more pretty trimmings on her hat than the man can on his, pray do not let him get the idea that is it more expensive.

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With the closing of this story, it is to a certainty, decided that there can never be any more spring jokes about spring hats, and of course everyone is convinced that the writer is surely a man, and therefore would be fair and honest to give the opposite sex such a gallant service in this much abused argument.

(Editor’s note: One thing I miss about articles in this time period is that there are no bylines. We have no idea who wrote what, and even no record of who the reporters were at this time. I’m inclined to this that this piece was written by a woman, or at least a man with a very close connection (wife, sisters or mother) to the feminine side. The argument for comparing prices and features of hats, with the notion that a woman’s hat has decorations that can be used again, leads me to think that a woman thought it up. I could be wrong, and there is no way to check.)