From women’s first prolonged entrance into American urban space in the antebellum period, male strangers have harassed women in public places with uninvited sexual remarks, stares, and touching. These intrusive behaviors have been a persistent and pervasive feature of women’s experience of the urban United States ever since. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including newspapers, legislation, ethnographic interviews, personal papers, and women’s published and unpublished writings—“Watching the Girls Go By: Sexual Harassment in the American Street, 1850-1980” details the emergence, persistence, and normalization of men’s harassment of women in public space, today commonly known as street harassment. It argues, firstly, that despite significant initial resistance to street harassment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainstream American discourse deemed behaviors like ogling or catcalling as the “right” of white, middle-class, heterosexual men by the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, men of color, and especially Black men, faced harsh, often violent, consequences for the same behaviors seen as trivial in white men. Secondly, mainstream public discourses generally portrayed targets of street harassment as “respectable” white women, where respectability hinged either on a woman’s middle-class or elite social status or on her perceived virtuousness. The construction of the ideal victim of street harassment as a respectable white woman obscured the experiences of women of color and the often more extreme or violent harassment they endured in public space. Thirdly, this dissertation argues that men’s harassment of women in public places had a material impact on women’s ability to navigate public space freely. Men’s harassment contributed to women’s discomfort and fear of sexual violence in public space and thus curtailed women’s freedom of mobility in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Throughout, this dissertation considers how idealized masculinities change and adapt in the face of opposition, absorbing attacks and reconstituting critiques into new versions of idealized masculinity. Thus, though women’s groups and law enforcement denounced street harassment from white men in the early 1900s, by the mid-twentieth century, behaviors like ogling and catcalling became part of the construction of an idealized white masculinity. “Watching the Girls Go By” suggests that a focus on trivialized violence can provide insight into the way white supremacist hetero-patriarchy has persisted over centuries.PHDHistory & Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163191/1/mmbrook_1.pd
