A history of “aggressive male street flirts, or ‘mashers'” in the U.S.

An article on a Stanford University blog about the research of historian Estelle Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University, brings to light the long history of women’s resistance to street harassment. I include an excerpt below and bold some of the parts I found the most fascinating.

“Aggressive male street flirts, or “mashers,” were a widespread and vexatious problem for American urban women in the pre-suffrage era. [Freedman] recently encountered the term in old newspaper articles and editorial cartoons, while doing research for a book on the history of sexual violence in America. Unlike the stereotypical black rapist in the white press and in the 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, mashers usually were depicted as well-dressed white men whose behavior was more irritating or comical than menacing. In this way, Freedman explained, the masher scare minimized the sexual threat of white men while leaving intact dominant fears of black men as violent rapists.”

“In America the term ‘masher’ initially applied to married men who approached women in public, or who frequented brothels. By the 1880s more sinister representations of mashers appeared. Cartoons showed them ogling women ominously in public spaces like Coney Island, which were becoming popular.”

The rise of the masher phenomenon reflected changes in American demographics. As industry supplanted agriculture, more single men were leaving their families for work in the cities. At the same time, more women were entering the public sphere on their own as shoppers, students and wage earners “Matrons ventured downtown to go to the new department stores, where they would encounter an increasingly young female sales force,” Freedman noted. “En route downtown, both shoppers and shopgirls might encounter the masher.”

One of the most interesting things about the masher problem, Freedman said, was the evolving public response to it. At first newspapers urged respectable men to play a stronger role in protecting women from ogling and catcalls. Gradually though, women began taking matters into their own hands. One of the masher cartoons shows an outraged shopper beating her tormentor with an umbrella.

When a crime wave terrorized Chicago in 1905, the Tribune helpfully reprinted stories from around the country about women who had fought back successfully. “One told of a Philadelphia stenographer who took boxing lessons from her brother and then knocked out the man who was forcing his attentions on her,” Freedman said. “Another told of a Japanese visitor to New York who used jujitsu against an electrician who tried to speak to her on the street.”

The masher threat also impelled more women to exercise in city parks not to improve their health or looks or even to provide the brute strength to fend off an attack, said Freedman, but to give them a “keener intuition of what her assailant” might be planning, noted the Tribune article.

On an institutional level, cities from New York to Los Angeles began hiring female police officers specifically to protect young women. “By 1920,” Freedman noted, “almost 300 women were serving on police forces in over 200 cities, many of them acting as quasi social workers.” Victims of street harassment also were encouraged to prosecute men who had tormented them, despite the notoriety a public court appearance might bring.

Interestingly, public outrage over mashers seemed to decline significantly after women got the vote in 1920. As Freedman observed, “In the new sexual era taking shape, public flirtation ceased to be as offensive as it had once been.” Movies popularized the adventurous flapper, while radio stations filled the airwaves with titillating songs about flirting. At the same time, “a more aggressive ideal of manhood was replacing the chivalrous protector and the respectful gentleman of the late Victorian era,” she said. “Guardians of street morality seemed outdated . . . The street pickup became comic and normative.”

It wasn’t until the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s that mashing again became a matter of public interest – only by this time the behavior had a new name: street harassment. As with the anti-masher movement, outrage over street harassment emerged at a time when more women were venturing into historically male spaces. And just as at the turn of the century, “Fighting back physically and legally represented a forum of female resistance to sexual threats,” Freedman said, “and insistence on full economic and political citizenship.”

I love learning about our predecessor resistors. It’s kinda depressing though to think about how long women have been putting up with and fighting street harassment. But let’s keep on going. A better future depends on our work.

Social Class Matters

I also want to note that when I think about history and street harassment, I always think about how street harassment is something lower class women have always had to deal with because they are the ones who’ve had to leave their homes to work, to go to the market, to run errands, etc, both for their families and perhaps for middle and upper class women’s families.

During different time periods, including ours today, whenever large numbers of upper and middle class women (and in the US, this often means white women) leave their homes unaccompanied by men to go places like work, school, and stores, they encounter street harassment, too. That’s when suddenly (some) people care about street harassment (but not enough). Class privilege. This was apparent to me in the Standford blog post and you can see it in articles like:

• Patricia Cline Coehn’s “Safety and Danger: Women on American Public Transport, 1750-1850.” In Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History
• Susan Drucker and Gary Gumpert’s “Shopping Women, and Public Space.” In Voices in the Street: Explorations in Gender, Media, and Public Space.
• Judith R. Walkowitz’s “Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London.”