Ask Almost Anyone About It, and You’ll Get a Big Eye-Roll. But It Changed Feminism Forever.

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Not long after I pressed “post” in the subreddit r/knitting, I received an email. My post had been flagged, and moderators wanted to figure out how best to handle it. “If we allow the post,” a moderator told me, they would have to schedule it for a time when they knew they’d be available to keep tabs on the conversation. “Some of the comments may get heated,” the moderator warned me.

My post was about a 10-year-old hat, known formally as the Pussyhat Project and colloquially as the “pussyhat,” all one word. That term alone may be enough to sleeper-activate a number of readers who, for many reasons, have tried to put that era behind them. But this November marks 10 years since Donald Trump was first elected president, which means it’s been almost 10 years since the first Women’s March. The rhetoric of the initial march, held the day after Trump’s inauguration, was informed by Trump’s sexist comments and the threats he and his incoming administration had made regarding reproductive rights. It’s largely remembered, however, by a single, pink hat that never fit quite right. One that looms over craftivism—and feminism—to this day.

When Jayna Zweiman first saw the announcement for the 2017 Women’s March, her heart sank. It was just a day after Trump was elected, and while she wanted to join protesters out in the street, a head and neck injury she had sustained in 2013 meant she wasn’t physically able. “I just felt really upset and isolated,” she tells me over the phone. It was her friend, Krista Suh, who had the idea for a knit hat. Those who couldn’t march could knit them for those who did.

The pussyhat was designed by Kat Coyle, owner of the Little Knittery in California, where both Zweiman and Suh spent time after the election to commiserate and organize. It’s a simple pattern, using a single skein of pink, worsted-weight yarn, and can be knit up in one afternoon. “If everyone at the march wears a pink hat, the crowd will be a sea of pink, showing that we stand together, united,” Zweiman and Suh wrote in the initial manifesto, which was shared with Slate. “By knitting a hat for a marcher, you are a part of a powerful visual statement.”

It worked. By January 2017, an estimated 100,000 hats had been made, and wearers descended upon Washington en masse. The photos are striking, hues of pink dominating frames underneath signs like “Sisterhood Is Powerful” and “Melania Blink Twice If You Need Help.” Ten years later, however, that visual statement has curdled, to the point that even evoking its memory can send Reddit moderators scrambling lest we risk reopening a wound that, almost a decade later, has not fully healed.

At first blush, the Pussyhat Project, which had first gone viral on the knitting social-media site Ravelry before making its way to Facebook and Instagram, received glowing reviews. The New Yorker referred to the knitters as “DIY revolutionaries,” and the movement itself was described by Glamour as “beyond empowering.” Now, the term “pussyhat feminism” tends to mean the exact opposite: a kind of performative activism that is, at best, cringe, and at worst, intentionally exclusionary.

To figure out how we got here, we have to lay down some facts. The Pussy Power Hat is a cat—Zweiman wants to make that clear. In the manifesto, the pattern’s final instruction reads, “Put on hat, and the cat ears will appear!” And while some people I spoke to for this story remember it this way, others swear the hat is meant to represent a vagina, due in no small part to the name.

The creators were well-aware of the term’s double meaning. While the hat was meant to resemble a cat, the name was a nod to the words uttered by Trump in the leaked 2005 Access Hollywood tape: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

But this subtlety did not translate when adopted by the wider public. Enough people donned a pink hat with cat ears under the earnest impression they were wearing a vagina that, for all intents and purposes, that is how the movement is remembered. It’s also the source of its controversy. In the background of the hat’s initial virality as a symbol of feminist activism, a different narrative was taking shape right from the beginning.

“How the Women’s March’s ‘genital-based’ feminism isolated the transgender community,” Marie Solis wrote for Mic just two days after the initial demonstration, crediting the Pussyhat Project with setting the tone for “a march that would focus acutely on genitalia at the expense of the transgender community.” Attendees marched with giant knitted uteruses, wore face paint of the biological gender signs, and sported paraphernalia emblazoned with the “The Future Is Female” slogan. Additionally, the proliferation of the color pink, particularly in regard to the hat itself, sent another clear signal: For those who wore the hat as a vagina, pink was only anatomically accurate for white women.

“Personally, I felt that the pink pussy hat was a step backward for intersectional feminism,” one knitter I spoke with, who requested not to be identified due to possible harassment, said. “At the time, I didn’t have the energy to have that conversation ad nauseam while also navigating Trump’s inauguration as a trans person of color. So, I avoided that movement and its proponents entirely.”

Suh eventually addressed the criticism in an interview with NBC Out a few weeks after the march. Suh is Asian American, and emphasized that the color pink had nothing to do with genitalia but was rather an attempt to reclaim a color associated with frivolous femininity. As for the accusations of transphobia, she told the outlet that she “never thought that by calling it the ‘pussyhat’ that it was saying that women’s issues are predicated on the possession of the pussy.” (Suh did not respond to multiple interview requests from Slate).

“I don’t talk about the pussyhat very often,” Zweiman tells me. “It was devastating that there were people who felt left out. Not all women have ‘pussies,’ ” she affirms, and not all “pussies” are pink. “This is all true,” she repeats. “But they’re cat ears.”

Both Zweiman and Suh’s responses are consistent with values that appeared in the initial pussyhat manifesto. “Women, whether transgender or cisgender, are mistreated in this society,” it reads. “In order to get fair treatment, the answer is not to take away our pussies, the answer is not to deny our femaleness and femininity, the answer is to demand fair treatment. A woman’s body is her own.”

Regardless, it’s ultimately the participants who gave the hat its meaning. While the Pussyhat Project was launched as a “momentary architecture art piece,” it instead became a symbol of a mainstream feminist movement whose reckoning was long overdue.

By the next Women’s March, in 2018, exhaustion with the hats had already started to set in. Taylyn Washington-Harmon was initially ambivalent about the pussyhat, but she remembers exactly when that changed: “Some woman decided to put the pussy hat on top of a Harriet Tubman statue,” she tells me in a phone call. A reporter, editor, and content strategist in the health and wellness space, Washington-Harmon published a response in Self. “Not My Pussy Hat,” the piece was titled. “Why I Didn’t Participate in the Women’s March This Year.”

The Harriet Tubman display had been captured on Instagram by writer and activist Nicole Moore, who had attended the NYCLU Rally for Rights and Equality. “All day I watched white women many, if not mostly, in their pink pussy hats marching who I never see the rest of the year at DACA rallies, at forums on violence against Black transgender women, or in Harlem at meetings regarding affordable housing or tenants rights,” she captioned the post.

In fact, it was the very white women making signs and donning pussyhats whose demographic majority-voted for Trump, and still vote MAGA to this day. Why, Washington-Harmon wondered, would she join a movement that “stands united” with women who don’t stand with her? This was still two years before the fall of the girlboss, when popular feminism looked like cross-stitch pillows and Leslie Knope quotes. Women’s empowerment was mostly about amassing capital—being executives and icons and badasses—without interrogating the race and class power structures this often upheld. In that sense, the pussyhat controversy wasn’t about cat ears or genitalia. It was a vehicle for bringing this larger hypocrisy to the forefront.

“When you put something out in the world, you can’t take it back,” Zweiman says of the pussyhat’s reputation. “When we get criticism, we have to look at where the criticism is coming from, understand it, and learn how to do better in the future.”

In January of this year, Gilah Mashaal felt much like Zweiman did those many years ago. As the owner of Minneapolis yarn store Needle & Skein, she could see the violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal occupation right outside the shop window, and yet she didn’t know how to help. She wanted to do something, and she thought of the pussyhat. How could she channel that same infectious craftivism but improve upon it for 2026? She and her employees landed on the “Melt the ICE” hat.

Inspired by the hats worn by Norwegians in the 1940s during the resistance to German Nazi occupation, the Melt the ICE pattern was similarly made to be accessible to the average knitter, and once again, it went viral. Instead of cat ears, the hat featured a tassel, which is much less likely to be confused with genitalia. Just like in 2016, yarn stores were having to post notices that they were running out of the necessary color yarn—this time red, instead of pink. But while the pussyhat was for a more general “awareness,” the Melt the ICE hat was a fundraiser. Cumulatively, the $5 pattern managed to raise an astonishing $850,000, which went directly to migrant justice agencies and mutual aid organizations both on the ground in Minneapolis and in the United States more broadly.

Zweiman, too, has learned and improved on the Pussyhat Project’s success. She now runs the Welcome Blanket project, which similarly invites crafters to use their chosen medium to create blankets that are displayed in exhibitions before being gifted to refugees through partnerships with local immigrant organizations. More than 8,000 blankets have been passed from maker to migrant since the project’s launch in 2017.

It’s likely neither the Melt the ICE hats or Welcome Blanket project would have happened if it weren’t for the pussyhat, and their success is a testament to the power of craftivism. “If you have never shown up in any way before, you have never made anything, you’ve never protested, you’ve never considered yourself an activist, if you let making a garment change you in some way, then you’re like, ‘Hey, I can do this,’ ” Betsy Greer, author of Knitting for Good!: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, and Political Change Stitch by Stitch, told me when I wrote about the Melt the ICE hat back in January. “ ‘Maybe I am an activist, or I can do activist things. Maybe next I’m gonna call my senators.’ ”