Stop Street Harassment

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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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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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Part 2: Redefining Rape and Street Harassment: 1880-1920s

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“Want to take a ride, little girl?” ~ Street harasser from the early 1900s.

As more and more scholars are uncovering, street harassment is not a new social problem. Stanford University Professor Estelle Freedman is one of the latest people to explore this in a chapter of her new book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (the major themes of the book and two lessons for today are covered in Part 1).

Street harassment predates this time period and poor women who have always been in public places for work have likely always faced street harassment (and worse), but once middle-class women began experiencing it in large numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they made it a visible problem.

By the late 1800s and early 1900s, a growing number of people lived in cities instead of farms or small villages and many white men used the new anonymity a city afforded them to harass women without facing consequences. Around this time period, more middle-class women of all races were in public spaces unaccompanied by men as they went to work, shops, and the theater, and as “unescorted women,” some men saw them as “fair game.” Phrases used by street harassers sound the same as today: “Hey, baby,” “Hey, honey,” “How much for you?”

Upset by this unwanted attention, many middle class women — both white and black — spoke out and took action, making it visible in newspapers and other publications.

Via Stanford University

Dr. Freedman graciously spoke with me by phone to answer a few questions for this article and sent me a complimentary copy of the book to raffle off!

1. HK: While the chapter focuses mostly on street harassment in the early 1900s, you found references to it in the 1770s when women expressed their concerns about “sexual dangers” in public spaces and spoke about their desire to have the “liberty to travel freely.” Did you find it surprising that very similar language to what anti-street harassment activists use today to talk about equality in public spaces was used hundreds of years ago by women? Why or why not?

EF: I’m not entirely surprised. Women began to use the language of rights in different historical periods in different cultures. In England and the United States, at the time when women were moving into the public sphere in larger numbers it was also a time of democratic revolutions and women said, “We deserve our rights, too.”

While street harassment was probably going on consistently through the centuries, the condemnation of harassment strongly correlates with the height of the suffrage movement in the early 1900s — and in more recent decades, with the feminist movement — and other claims to space and rights.

2. HK: Throughout your chapter, you cite newspaper articles featuring women who verbally and physically fought back against street harassers and even reported them to the police using laws like disorderly conduct so that the harasser faced a fine or a night in jail. Do you have a favorite story among the many you read?

EF: Two stories come to mind right away. One is from 1924 in New York City when a black woman was riding the subway and a white man from a southern state is trying to pick her up as a prostitute. When she refused his attention, he told her that if they had been in Georgia, “I would have you strung up.” A white woman who witnessed this joined her and detained him until the police arrived and arrested him. This is a really rare example of a black and a white woman cooperating together and bringing in the authorities. It was very striking and atypical.

Another story I like is in Chicago around 1906-1908 when women held self defense classes in parks for other women. The idea was to help them feel less fearful in the streets, to walk with confidence, and to give them a sense of their physical power while in public spaces.

3. HK: After World War I, there was a shift in how street harassment was viewed by the public. For a few decades leading up to the war, street harassment was largely seen as inappropriate and women who fought back were applauded, but then there was a shift to where it was seen as flirting and something women asked for by being unaccompanied in public spaces. There was also a heightened concern for the men accused of being harassers. Can you talk a little bit more about why this shift happened and its legacy?

EF: The new sexual values at that time that acknowledged women’s sexual agency and that encouraged women to not accept that they were passive objects of men’s desires was double edged: in some ways it empowered young women to feel able to be active sexual agents but it also meant that the line between wanted and unwanted sexual attention could be blurred. Once flirting became seen as acceptable public behavior between young people in public places, it became easier for street harassers to say, “I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was just flirting,” and that was taken as an acceptable response.

In the early 1900s, there were police women (mostly white) who went undercover and arrested men who harassed them. One of the reactions to this was the concern that men were being victimized by women who didn’t like men or by women who didn’t understand the new sexual mores. There was a growing belief that female police officers were arresting men for behaviors that should no longer be criminalized.

In short, the new morality just after WWI made it harder to always know when the line has been crossed between wanted and unwanted attention.

In the white press, there were still some stories about women who fight back and they were applauded for doing so, but after the 1910s, there were fewer stories supporting women’s self defense and more sympathetic stories about men fearing being false accused.

Many African Americans migrated north during this time period and in the black press, however, there was actually an increase in articles focused on white men harassing black women and girls, treating them like prostitutes. The black presses called out white men for this behavior and fought to establish black women’s respectability.

4. HK: Today, sometimes men of color are disproportionately blamed for street harassment and depicted as street harassers. I found it interesting, then, to learn that in the time period you examined, the majority of news stories and reports featured white men as harassers – of both white and African American women.  Can you share why this was, and how it ties into the larger issues of race in your book?

EF: In the newspapers, early nineteenth century mashers were all white and for good reason. For a black man to even chance looking at white woman on the street could lead to lynching. They had much less opportunity to be harassers. It would have been highly dangerous. [The newspapers typically only depicted white men as harassers of black women, too. While black women faced street harassment by black men, they largely kept quiet for fear of fueling the myth that black men were sexual predators.]

By type casting white men as a masher, it reinforced the idea that white men are harassers and black men are rapists. Keeping white men in the role of minor offenders masked white men’s more sever offenses against white and black women.

5. HK: Right now, there is a huge resurgence in attention to the issue of street harassment and what we can do about it. What is one lesson you think we can learn today from how the issue was treated and addressed in the late 1800s to early 1900s?

EF: One lesson is that you can’t separate the issue of street harassment from the larger issue of inequality. Women are underrepresented in legislatures, leadership, and are underpaid, and as long as women occupy a subordinate position economically and politically, they’re going to remain more sexually vulnerable.

Whenever women are mobilizing politically to get more rights, they also seem to have more of a vocal voice opposing sexual violence and street harassment. We need to keep the vulnerability of sexual assault and street harassment within the larger grid of women needing more economic and political leadership. We can’t treat it as separate.

Just passing laws doesn’t make a difference; we have to have a cultural shift, too. It’s really those deeper cultural values that can undermine the legal changes. Keeping an eye on what’s happening in the larger culture around sexuality is important and the more that women gain economically and politically, the more they can gain sexually.

You can find other scholarly articles, books, and theses about street harassment in the Stop Street Harassment resources section.

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.

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

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Via Stanford University, this image is from 1906

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:

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