Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

DC’s New Mayor is a Safe Public Spaces Champion!

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I’m so excited that our Safe Public Spaces Champion awardee Muriel Bowser is MAYOR of Washington, DC!

Via NBC News:

“”It’s my charge to make [D.C.] greener, healthier, safer and more fiscally stable than we find it today,” she said.

Formerly D.C.’s Ward 4 councilmember, Bowser is now just the second woman to lead the District. Early in her inaugural remarks, she thanked the female mayors of other major cities, saying, “Today, because of you, I am one too.”

It’s in large part thanks to her that the Washington Metropolitan Area has an anti-harassment transit campaign. In 2012 when I was part of a group organized by Collective Action for Safe Spaces (I was one of their board members at the time) that testified about harassment before the DC city council and the all male WMATA leadership responded by saying harassment wasn’t a problem, Bowser told them “as a woman I feel differently” and told them to do something. And they did. #WomenLeaders

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Seattle street harassers used to face this punishment…

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In the late 1800s and early 1900s, street harassers were called “mashers” across the USA. In Seattle, if you were convicted of being a masher, you may have to put in time on the chain gang! Wow.

Via CrossCut.com —

“Even though Seattle was awash in prostitution, behavior toward ‘proper’ ladies had to be protected at all costs, especially as the city’s middle class expanded. Two young men in Ballard were sentenced to the gang for getting a 16-year-old Ballard girl drunk on beer.

The Seattle Times defended a chain gang sentence for another young man who was arrested for “annoying a young woman on a Seattle street.” The paper editorialized, “That penalty, too, may seem severe to some, but it does not to any man with a wife or daughter who is occasionally compelled to be upon the streets of this city alone. The offense of the ‘masher’ is akin to that of the rapist. There is only a difference in the quality of the nerve displayed. The penalty under the law is, unfortunately, too light.”

In 1907, police chief Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein decided to crack down on men and boys who harassed proper ladies on the street — a bit ironic for a policeman who was later prosecuted and jailed for taking bribes from prostitution interests in the city. Wappy threatened to start a “second chain gang to be made up of dudes and brainless individuals who have the mashing habit.” He said, “It would be a joy to me to see a finely dressed young man…working alongside a hobo, chained together with irons….”

 

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Canada: Street Harassment in Ontario A Century Ago

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By: Lisane Thirsk, Ottawa, Canada, SSH Correspondent

Criminal Assize Indictment, Algoma District, 1916. Available at the Archives of Ontario.

After reading SSH blog posts earlier this month about the history of street harassment in the U.S. (book review, author interview, and 100 years of activism), I was inspired to dig up some research I did a couple years ago for my master’s degree. For one assignment I went to the Archives of Ontario and uncovered criminal case files about street harassment around the turn of the 20th century.

According to historians, this period was characterized by “moral panic” in Canada. Social anxiety surrounded immigration, urban growth, and women’s shifting roles in public life.

My search at the Archives was guided by Karen Dubinsky’s Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of street harassment – particularly Chapter Two on “The Social and Spatial Settings of Sexual Violence” in rural and northern areas of the province.

The legal records cited in Dubinsky’s book, as well as those I examined on microfilm reels at the Archives, provide vast documentation of sexual violence committed by strangers outdoors.

In rural communities, rape and sexual assault were often reported by women who had been attacked while walking through isolated farm fields. On small-town roads, women more often reported offences such as being chased, insulted or grabbed.

Just like in the U.S., street harassment was known as “mashing” at that time, and it was viewed as undesirable behaviour. The records show that these assaults didn’t just occur at night or when women were walking alone.

Panic emerged in numerous communities in Ontario. Mashers were stereotypically imagined as strangers in berry patches, tramps from Montreal, taxi drivers, and Indigenous men.

One of the most infamous predatory figures was known as Jack the Hugger, the nickname of a serial sexual assaulter (or more likely, several assaulters) appearing in the records from 1894 to 1916.

When confronted by a street masher, women were quite often assertive and resourceful. They defended their right to the street with defiant words, an umbrella, or by slapping the perpetrator.

Meanwhile, the prevalence of street harassment led commentators, including judges, to call for harsher punishment in the name of women’s freedom of mobility. And it was not uncommon for women – at least those who show up in the archives as “respectable” – to successfully pursue justice through legal avenues.

In her book Dubinsky reveals that the willingness of authorities to hold mashers accountable was due in part to the growth of the labour movement in Ontario.

As it became more acceptable for single women to migrate to towns and cities for jobs, scrutiny shifted to young lower-class men harassing female factory workers. Men’s public idleness and aggression were seen as threats to the values of self-control, restraint and productivity.

Below are the basic facts from one of the case files from Sault Ste. Marie that I examined at the Archives. It included statements from the complainants, the accused, and witnesses; and it illustrates some of Dubinsky’s conclusions about mashing in early 20th century Ontario.

* Around 7:30 a.m. in July 1916, Robert E. began following Emma B., a young woman who lived at a boarding house and was on her way to work at a tailor’s shop. Emma had been alerted to the Jack-the-Hugger stories circulating in her community, so she turned onto a busier street. Robert caught up to her, grabbed her hip, and said, “You would make good fucking.” He ran away, but Emma caught up to him and told him to keep his hands off her and to mind his own business.

* A few days later, Robert assaulted Louise P. around 5:15 in the evening. In her deposition Louise reported, “a young man caught hold of me by the bre[a]st … He turned around and put his hands down the front of his pants … I asked him what the devil he meant, and I started to follow him up, and then he ran.”

* In September 1916, Robert was charged with two counts of Indecent Assault on a Female. His defence focused on him having been steadily employed at the Steel Plant.

When we look back on the history of sexual violence, we tend to assume one of two things.

We either believe that in “the good old days” women were more respected in public and harassment wasn’t as explicit. Emma and Louise’s stories, along with many others I encountered at the Archives of Ontario, would suggest otherwise.

Or else we believe that as a society we’ve come a long way from the prejudiced thinking of the past. By reading between the lines in documents like Robert E.’s indictment, Dubinsky shows that it wasn’t always women’s wellbeing or principles of social equality that guided the prosecution of street harassers.

If we look carefully at today’s responses to street harassment – legal or otherwise – we might find many of these same patterns playing out.

Lisane works in the non-profit communications sector and supports local anti-street harassment advocacy through Hollaback! Ottawa. In 2012, she completed a Master’s in Socio-Legal Studies at York University in Toronto, where she wrote her Major Research Paper on gender-based street harassment. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies and Spanish from the University of British Columbia.

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Part 1: Redefining Rape and Street Harassment: 1880-1920s

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I loved meeting Dr. Freedman in CA last year at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference!

In college, I double majored in history and women’s and gender studies, and I also regularly faced street harassment when I left campus. I had no language to talk about it at the time and I often changed my life to try to avoid it.

Fast forward to present day, and as a history and women’s studies nerd and a street harassment activist, I was so thrilled to meet Stanford University Professor Estelle Freedman last year at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference and hear her presentation about street harassment in the 1880s to 1920s, based on a chapter in a forthcoming book.

That book is now out, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard Press). While I bought her book because of the street harassment chapter, I read it cover-to-cover and literally underlined and made margin notes on every page.

In approachable language, she examines women’s (and their male allies’) efforts to strengthen laws against rape, marital rape, and incest, and the parallel and intersecting movements by persons of color (and their white allies) to gain more legal rights and end lynching. I highly recommend her book if you’re interested in ending sexual violence, seeing racial equality, and if you care about social justice in general.

She graciously agreed to a phone interview to discuss the mashers chapter, and that is found in Part 2. First, I want to share the overall themes of her book and their lessons for today.

Book Themes:

White men fear losing power:

A core theme of her book is white men’s fear of losing power, be that sexual power or political power. There were white men who openly fought against the passage of stronger rape and incest laws and laws that raised the age of consent. They used their position as the primary lawmakers, judges, and jury members to make decisions that best served their interests, and used their roles as journalists, newspaper owners, physicians and scholars to try to sway public opinion toward maintaining their rights at the expense of all women and all persons of color. White men were even faster to prosecute men of color for same-sex relationships than they were white men, allowing white men who had same-sex relationships (consensual or non-consensual) to rarely face consequences, even in states where those sex acts were illegal.

As one way to keep sexual power, some white men portrayed women and children (of both sexes) as unreliable, seductive, and sexually promiscuous. They also used “scientific” arguments similar to today for dismissing rape claims. For example, in 1862, Dr. Edmund Arnold testified in court that it was very improbable that pregnancy could result from rape because in “truly forcible violations…the uterine organs cannot well be in a condition favorable to impregnation.” In 1913, Dr. Gurney Williams wrote that if women just crossed their knees, they would be able to prevent rape.

Racial justice and sexual violence are connected:

Another major book theme was how racial justice and sexual violence are intertwined. For a long time, white men wrote laws in such a way that in some states, women of color could not legally be raped; they were seen as always sexually available. This made life extremely unsafe for them, especially in public places where white (and sometimes black) men could harass them and attack them and rarely face any consequences. Similarly, for decades, rape was called “The Negro Crime,” and classifying African American men as the rapists of white women gave white people the justification for lynching them and restricting their legal rights. Tactics for fighting lynching included showing that African American men were not sexual predators, and strategies for improving rape laws meant making sure women (and men) of all races were protected.

Lessons for Today:

Today, the legacy of racial injustices live on: women of color experience higher rates of sexual violence than white women and many men of color are falsely locked up for sex crimes they did not commit. The legacy of victim-blaming sexual assault survivors and debates over “legitimate rape” also sadly continues on.

The two most important lessons I took away are that we need:

1. Racial Allies. Throughout Redefining Rape, white women rarely addressed the sexual violence black women faced, especially at the hands of white men, nor did many of them join forces with African Americans to increase their legal rights or stop lynching. This sadly continues today. Most white people think racism isn’t a problem and so they don’t work to address it (and obviously many of us are perpetrators of racism), even within the feminist movement. The #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag on Twitter a few weeks ago made this clear. It was an online discussion led by women of color that called out white women for ignoring and silencing of women of color’s voices and issues within the feminist movement. This is something I’m personally working on as a white ally.

Racism and sexism and sexual violence are all intertwined. Those who are most marginalized and impacted need to have their voices heard; their experiences matter the most if we truly want to strive for equality.

2. Non-White Male Leaders: It is imperative to have more women of all races and men of color in leadership roles and positions of power. Until that happens, white men’s views, interests, and rights will continue to take precedent over everyone else’s, even if it is in lesser ways than 100 or 200 years ago. It will be hard to eradicate racism, sexual violence, street harassment, and victim-blaming until our leaders truly reflect all people, not just one segment of the population.

Part 2:

As Dr. Freedman conducted the research for her book, she kept coming across the term “mashers” and when she looked into it more, she realized these were street harassers. There were so many references to them during this time period that she devoted a whole chapter to the subject. Read my interview with her in Part 2.

DRAWING:

Dr. Freedman donated a copy of her book (value $35) for me to give away in a drawing! Because of the cost of shipping the heavy book internationally, I am limiting this to people with U.S. addresses.

There are two ways to enter your name into the random drawing, you can:

1. Tweet out an article or resource from the SSH blog and add @stopstharassmnt #Mashers to it.
2. Submit a street harassment story or street respect story to the blog (include an email address and note in the “other” field you want to be included in the drawing).

I will hold the drawing on October 18.

Read an excerpt of the book on Salon.com | Read an interview on the Hairpin. | Read a review in the SF Chronicles

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