Whenever I told people about my dissertation project, I was often greeted with the same question: “How exactly do you research street harassment?” The ephemeral nature of men’s stranger intrusions presents a unique challenge for any scholar wishing to document its history. Catcalls and leers exist for mere seconds, evaporating into the air as quickly as they appear. I have had to come at research from an oblique angle, searching for references to intrusive behaviors in archival folders marked “Single Women” or “Rape” or “Public Safety.” As a result, I draw on a diverse array of primary sources to excavate women’s experiences of men’s stranger intrusions and to trace the shifting discourses that gave meaning to those experiences. For instance, when law enforcement and city officials saw men’s intrusive behaviors as a matter of public safety, newspapers reported on individual incidents and cities passed anti-mashing legislation. I use publications from activists and reformers to identify the range of responses to stranger intrusions, including self-defense training and street safety tips that were widely disseminated throughout the twentieth century. Women’s published writings, personal diaries, and interviews help me to understand women’s thoughts and feelings about behaviors like ogling or catcalling and how their experiences differed from or mirrored mainstream discourse. Finally, popular cultural products like songs, films, or novels help
me to trace the normalization of men’s stranger intrusions until they were seen as a normal, even humorous, part of urban life by the mid-twentieth century.
Because one of the key features of men’s stranger intrusions is that they occur between people who do not know one another, I have found it helpful to draw on the work of scholars thinking about interactions between strangers. This is not to say that an acquaintance, friend, or lover cannot ogle, catcall, or touch a woman without her invitation, but this is a fundamentally different interaction, bound up in the personal relationship between two people who know each other. Men’s stranger intrusions, on the other hand, demonstrate the widespread cultural
presumption that men (and I would argue especially white, middle-class or affluent men) are entitled to watch women, comment on women’s presence in public space, or touch women, all without a pre- existing relationship. The work of Erving Goffman has been helpful for understanding the social relationships and rules of social interaction that make men’s stranger intrusions possible. Goffman’s work is cited liberally throughout the existing literature on street harassment and is a favorite for many studying the performance of identity categories in everyday contexts. Goffman has theorized the forms of interaction that have been socially acceptable and unacceptable in various contexts and between different kinds of people. He argues that people navigating public spaces tend to afford strangers the right to “civil inattention,” or the right to be unobserved and unmolested in public.49
Ogling and staring, for instance, are considered vulgar and constitute a breaking of social civility reserved for so-called “open persons,” those whom it is socially acceptable to observe, speak to, or otherwise approach at any point. An open person may be an adult with a child or a puppy, whom many would feel comfortable approaching, or an open person may be someone whom society has marked as unworthy of respect, such as people with disabilities, people considered ugly or fat
according to cultural norms, or anyone presenting to the world in a non-normative way.50 In her
study on street harassment in 1990s Indianapolis, Carol Brooks Gardner has argued that women are often “open persons,” especially when navigating the city alone. Their solo presence in public marks them as someone who may be approached, called to, or stared at without significant social
repercussions.51 If, as feminist theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson suggests, “the freedom to be
inconspicuous” is “one of the major liberties accorded to the ordinary,” then women in public are extraordinary presences in public space.52
However, perhaps the most influential theoretical framework for this project has been the feminist theory that sexual harassment exists along a continuum of sexual violence. Sociologist Liz Kelly was not the first to write about this theory, but her 1988 book on the subject has been indispensable for thinking about the way sexual violence is not just made up of violent, aberrant behaviors like rape. Kelly argues that women do not experience sexual violence in the hierarchized, clear cut way that it is often described in academic research or the legal code. Rather, women regularly experience behaviors seen as “typical”—ogling, flashing, obscene remarks—as harmful both for their own sake and because they serve as a warning of potential danger ahead. As Kelly writes of sexual harassment, “It is important to remember that although further violence may not be intended women cannot know this until after the event.”53 A lascivious leer may not devolve into
physical violence, but cultural messages, personal experience, and even the prevalence of crime reporting in a particular area can contribute to a feeling that such “typical” behaviors could quickly escalate to something far more “serious.” As a result, Kelly shows that women often feel they must be constantly vigilant and aware of their surroundings.
50 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).
51 Carol Brooks Gardner, Passing by: Gender and Public Harassment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 93. 52 Garland-Thomson, Staring, 35.
This blurring of forms of harassment, which causes a behaviors like ogling to be
experienced as a harbinger of physical violence, existed long before Kelly theorized the continuum of sexual violence. In the nineteenth century, women were expected to guard against the male gaze for its own sake but also because oglers were potential (if not actual) rapists. As historian John F. Kasson writes, “When middle-class women left the confines of their home to venture out into public, they entered a realm in which they felt—or were expected to feel—particularly vulnerable. From an impertinent glance, an unwelcome compliment, the scale of improprieties rose through a series of gradations to the ultimate violation of rape.”54 Occasionally, this frightening escalation
appears to have played out in reality. When Richard Ivins murdered Bessie Hollister on the streets of Chicago in 1916, coverage of the incident depicted Ivins as a meandering stranger who took the opportunity to accost an unescorted woman and then murdered her when she resisted his advances.55 Reports explicitly linked Hollister’s murder with the mashing crisis and called on law
enforcement to “arrest ‘mashers’ and young men loitering at street corners” so that Chicago women might feel safe in public again.56 These examples, where a leering look or a sexual remark might be
precursors to rape or murder, demonstrates Fiona Vera-Gray’s argument that “quieter forms of intrusion…rely on the possibilities and realities of the louder, criminal forms, to have the particular impact they do.”57 Men’s stranger intrusions derive power from and reinforce larger societal
messages about women’s sexual and physical vulnerability in public space.
Intrusive behaviors are therefore a mode of intimidation, one that reminds the target that her presence in public space is unnatural and worthy of note. Feminist philosopher Sally Scholz has provocatively described street harassment as “part of the strategy of the war within patriarchy.” A
54 Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 128.
55 “Youth Strangles Society Woman to Death with Wire,” St. Louis Post - Dispatch, January 13, 1906; Emily Remus, A Shopper’s Paradise, 180-181.
56 “Terror Due to Murders,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1906. 57 Vera-Gray, Men’s Intrusion, Women’s Embodiment, 22.
catcall, for instance, serves to dehumanize the target, to fragment her and reduce her to body parts (for instance, a “nice piece of ass”), and to justify future violence against her. The effect on the target, Scholz demonstrates, is immediate and physical. A catcall forces the object of harassment to become suddenly conscious of her body in a visceral way. She becomes aware of the way it moves and how it may appear to the stranger who has obtrusively observed it.58 Feminist writer Meredith
Tax described this phenomenon in her 1970 piece on everyday sexism. She writes of a group of men who catcalled a woman, they “make her a participant in their fantasies without asking if she is willing. They make her feel ridiculous, or grotesquely sexual, or hideously ugly. Above all, they make her feel like a thing.”59 Repeated instances of this kind of harassment, experienced weekly or daily
and compounded over many years, create the feeling of being always watched and always on guard. It becomes difficult for the target to move fluidly and comfortably through space, as she is
constantly monitoring her every movement, bracing herself for the next catcall.60 Feminist
researchers Sue Wise and Liz Stanley have described this experience as the “dripping tap” of sexism. In contrast with the “sledgehammer” of sexism—those most egregious and “extreme” forms of sexual violence and discrimination—the dripping tap constitutes an endless stream of small, individual slights, put-downs, or demands on a woman’s time and energy. To extend the metaphor, these small drops can mount up over time until women feel they are drowning in sexist abuse.61
The build-up of “dripping tap” sexism, and specifically of men’s stranger intrusions, can have long-lasting affects on women’s ability to practice full bodily autonomy in public space. The experience of a million small intrusions can create the sense that one is always looking out for the next intrusion, always on edge. As cultural geographers Mona Domosh and Joni Seager argue, the
58 Scholz, “Catcalls and Military Strategy,” 250-252.
59 Meredith Tax, Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Daily Life (Cambridge, MA: Bread and Roses, 1970), 5. Emphasis in
original.
60 Scholz, “Catcalls and Military Strategy.”
perpetual anxiety women face when navigating public space means “that most women live under a self-imposed ‘curfew.’ They avoid walking in certain places, at particular times, and often will not go out alone.”62 Indeed, the women who populate the ensuing chapters describe their own attempts at
self-imposed curfews, demonstrating that the threat of intrusive behaviors has physical effects even in the absence of the behaviors themselves. For example, in 1929, Chicago resident Miss Rose Sugar of West Division Street hinted at the long-term impact of encountering mashers on the city’s streets. The Chicago Tribune asked Sugar and five other Chicagoans if they thought it was “safe for a woman to go about alone in Chicago at night.” “I certainly do not,” was Sugar’s emphatic reply. “It is not altogether safe in the daytime. I seldom am out at night without an escort. But from any woman’s experiences in the daytime on the streets, in street cars, and in fact everywhere, one can imagine what a woman has to put up with after dark.”63 And imagine I must, for neither Sugar nor the
Tribune provided further explanation. What kinds of experiences would someone like Sugar have already endured “on the streets, in street cars, and in fact everywhere”? Was she talking about catcalls and wolf-whistles, or mugging and sexual assault? What precautions did women like Sugar take to avoid unpleasant experiences? Did they avoid certain parts of town or notorious street car routes? What impact did the expectation of public harassment—the exhaustion that comes with the constant anticipation of being catcalled or stared at—have on women’s navigation of public space? If the mere threat of harassment was enough to convince Sugar never to go “out at night without an escort,” what implications did this have for women’s full access to urban public space? These are the kinds of questions I have sought to answer with this project.
62 Domosh and Seager, Putting Women in Place, 100.