Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States

Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States

Brookfield, Molly M.

Hardcover

Series: Gender and American Culture

General Gender StudiesGeneral SociologyGeneral United States History

ISBN10: 1469697297
ISBN13: 9781469697291
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Sep 8 2026
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.28
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
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.

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