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Watching the Girls Go by

A History of Street Harassment in the United States

By: Molly M. Brookfield

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Hardcover | 8 September 2026

At a Glance

Hardcover
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 2.5 x 15.5

Hardcover

$292.75

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Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers 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.

Industry Reviews

"An outstanding history of an urban practice that hides in plain sight."-Anne Gray Fischer, author of The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification "Opening a window into an important facet of the history of sexuality, Molly Brookfield's fascinating book illustrates how street harassment was not always accepted, was not always the norm, and was not always without consequence."-Catherine O. Jacquet, author of The Injustices of Rape: How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950-1980

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