“Watching the Girls Go By” uses an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to understand how everyday experiences of ogling or catcalling have limited women’s ability to navigate public space despite mainstream discourses that trivialized men’s intrusive behaviors as normal or benign. While present-day debates about sexual harassment in the popular media tend to focus on violent, serial offenses, feminist scholars of sexual harassment have shown that such acts are rare in comparison to behaviors like sexual jokes, put-downs, incivility, and the more typical behaviors
associated with men’s stranger intrusions, such as catcalling.36 Such behaviors increase women’s
feelings of fear in public space because they derive power from the threat of further physical and sexual violence.37 Cultural messages about women’s sexual and physical vulnerability in public space,
coupled with a woman’s own past experience of violent attacks or even the prevalence of crime reporting in a particular area, can create a feeling that seemingly benign forms of harassment, such as a leer or a catcall, have the potential to turn violent at any moment.38 As a result, women wishing
to avoid sexual harassment in public have often felt compelled to constrain or modify their own movement through urban space.39 For example, in the 1910s, Chicago working women complained
about “nervy flirts” whose leering and groping forced them off streetcars mid-commute; while in the 1970s, readers of Ms magazine described how they altered their routes through the city to avoid catcalls.40 Thus, in explicating the historical roots of men’s stranger intrusion, this dissertation
demonstrates how quieter, typical forms of harassment have impinged on women’s ability to move freely though public space for decades.
In examining the intersections of gender history, urban history, and feminist theories of sexual harassment, this dissertation speaks to historical claims about how women’s presence in American cities changed conceptions of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historians of the antebellum United States have shown how the growth of new cities provided many Americans with increased opportunities for anonymity and social fluidity.41 Monied,
36 Emily A. Leskinen, Lilia M. Cortina, and Dana B. Kabat, “Gender Harassment: Broadening Our Understanding of
Sex-Based Harassment at Work,” Law and Human Behavior 35, no. 1 (2011): 25–39; National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering,
and Medicine (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2018).
37 Logan, “Street Harassment,” 196–211; Vera-Gray, Men’s Intrusion, Women’s Embodiment. 38 Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 39 Bowman, “Street Harassment.”
40 “Have You Met a Nervy Flirt?,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 30, 1916; Letter to Ms magazine, October 22, 1977,
Folder 135, Carton 5, Letters to Ms., 1972-1980, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Letter to
Ms magazine, April 16, 1981, Folder 8, Carton 10, Letters to Ms., 1970-1998, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University. See also chapter two and the epilogue.
able-bodied white women were among those who exercised greater physical and social mobility as they frequented urban leisure spots and department stores.42 At the turn of the twentieth century, an
influx of single working women into Northern cities further contributed to a loosening of sexual mores and gender roles, especially for white women. They joined the workforce, demanded expanded political rights, and enjoyed more opportunities for heterosocializing away from their families.43 My research demonstrates, however, that urbanization was a double-edged sword when it
came to gender equality and sexual liberalism. The same anonymity and social fluidity that made the city an ideal place to challenge existing gender roles and experiment with new sexual subjectivities also allowed white male strangers to harass women in public space with little fear of being
recognized or reprimanded. My work suggests new avenues for research that would consider how urbanization both gave women unprecedented opportunities to exercise personal, political, and sexual autonomy, but also made possible the intrusive behaviors that limited women’s ability to fully exercise their newfound freedoms.
My dissertation augments the few existing historical treatments of sexual harassment in public. Historians Estelle Freedman, Wendy Rouse, and Emily Remus have studied Progressive-Era mashing in the context of legal definitions of rape, the self-defense movement, and women
consumers in Chicago, respectively.44 These works have identified men’s intrusive behaviors as an
intriguing phenomenon but have examined them to aid other historical arguments rather than
42 Stansell, City of Women; Ryan, Women in Public; David Scobey, “Nymphs and Satyrs: Sex and the Bourgeois Public
Sphere in Victorian New York,” Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 43–66; Garland-Thomson, Staring; Remus,
A Shopper’s Paradise.
43 Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in New York City, 1880 to 1920 (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1986); Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and
Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005).
44 Freedman, Redefining Rape; Wendy L. Rouse, Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement (New York:
analyzing them on their own terms. My dissertation expands on their work by centering men’s stranger intrusions and tracing their prevalence and persistence through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Finally, this dissertation will grapple with the decades-long question taken up by cultural historians about the role of experience in historical narrative and the causal power of discourse. When gender historian Joan Scott published her iconic 1991 essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” it set off debate among historians about whether the historian’s job is to document the experiences of historical subjects or the “operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced.”45 Scott argues in favor of the latter, suggesting that
historians must work to denaturalize identity categories and show how difference is created, reinforced, and normalized through discourse. In one of her more provocative passages, she suggests, “the project of making experience visible precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself, its categories of representation.”46 Thus, an overemphasis on
experience not only obscures the ways in which categories like gender, race, and class are
constructed but can actually serve to perpetuate those categories and the social inequality they make possible. This project will build on the work of scholars who have heard Scott’s warning but have nevertheless asserted the importance of taking experience seriously as a category of analysis and a necessary part of understanding difference. Historians like Judith Walkowitz, George Chauncey, Nan Enstad have blended analyses of discursive processes and experience to make convincing and
45 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (July 1, 1991): 792. For historiographical
treatments of these debates, see James W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” The
American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 1, 2012): 746–71; James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael
O’Malley, eds., The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
influential arguments about the causal roles of both discourse and experience.47 Like gender
historian Julie Berebitsy, whose study of sexual relationships in the workplace influenced this work, I aim “to connect the stories of actual women and men…to the dominant cultural narratives of their time, paying close attention to how shifting ideologies colored their experiences.”48
I argue that material conditions, experience, and discourse are all equally vital parts of the story of men’s intrusive practices in American cities. Firstly, the demographic and material changes that came with nineteenth-century urbanization threw strangers together in public space and created the material conditions that made it feasible for male strangers to interfere with women’s free and unfettered movement through public space. The mashing crisis marks a moment of discursive struggle over the meaning of such intrusions. Women, law enforcement, and national press pinpointed mashing as a problem of urban life. They contested definitions of mashing and argued about the best way to respond. Over time, discursive processes that trivialized and minimized women’s experiences of mashing won out and normalized men’s stranger intrusions as an expected part of city life. This normalization was bolstered through cultural categories like the “girl watcher,” that turned uninvited looking into a whimsical and humorous pastime. Women’s phenomenological experience of men’s stranger intrusions, however, continually butted up against discourse that trivialized those experiences. Their frustrated, confused, or frightened voices occasionally broke through the mainstream discourse that catcalls were compliments and ogling was harmless. With the turn to consciousness raising that came with 1960s and 1970s feminist activism, women’s groups and publications began to articulate what felt to many like a universal female experience of “street harassment.” Their discursive attempts to define and condemn men’s stranger intrusions helped to denaturalize behaviors like uninvited looking and placed them in a context of widespread societal
47 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Enstad, Ladies of Labor.
misogyny. Women’s phenomenological experiences of men’s stranger intrusions and their increased access to public discourse made it possible for activists to contest and remake narratives of
uninvited looking and posit new methods for combatting it. Like Scott, I believe that a study of discourse is key to understanding the perpetuating of difference and inequality, but my project will also show that lived experience can be a vital source of knowledge that counters and remakes discourse.