Watching the Girls Go By

A History of Street Harassment in the United States

Molly M. Brookfield

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469697307
  9781469697291
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469692401
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers have greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Street Insults
• CHAPTER TWO The Masher
• CHAPTER THREE Whistling Wolves and Ogling Sailors
• CHAPTER FOUR Girl-Watching and “Eye Rape”
• CHAPTER FIVE Defining Street Harassment
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index