Rage Against the Masher
The Mashers, by Currier & Ives, c. 1884. [Library of Congress]
On the morning of February 4, 1906, the Chicago Daily Tribune posed an urgent question to its readers: “What can be done to rid the Palmer House block of Mashers?” The headline, scrawled across two pages, was accentuated with an illustration that dominated the top half of the section. The drawing depicted a young white woman walking down a Chicago street while a group of well-dressed white men, ten in all, stood in a line and watched her pass. These men were the “mashers” of the headline, men who leered at, spoke to, followed, and otherwise bothered women they did not know in public places.
The problem of the masher was not unique to Chicago. When the Tribune published its exposé on the Palmer House block masher, the nation was in the throes of what some newspapers were calling the “crusades” against mashers. Local and national press took notice of the masher from his first inception in the 1880s, but coverage of mashing skyrocketed in the first years of the 20th century, peaking in the mid-1910s. By the late 1890s and into the next decade, mashing was a subject of public debate and outrage across the country. Though one Wisconsin paper described the masher as “an evil belonging to larger cities,” medium- and small-sized towns were by no means immune to mashing. Towns as small as Mount Vernon, Iowa (population 1,532 in 1910), had a masher problem large enough to warrant consideration of an antimashing ordinance. It seemed no place was safe from the masher.
Americans reserved the moniker of “masher” primarily, if not exclusively, for white men, making the antimasher crusades a significant, if short-lived, challenge to white men’s dominance in public space. Women’s rights activists were particularly forceful in their critiques of mashing, pointing out that white men who mashed betrayed a sense of entitlement over women’s bodies. White women insisted that mashing made a laughingstock of the idea that white men were their natural protectors. White men were the primary perpetrators of intrusive behaviors, they argued, so how could they rely on those same men to defend them from sexual violence in public?
At the end of the 19th century, white Americans emphasized self-restraint and temperance as ideal qualities of “civilized” white “manliness,” while progressives like Theodore Roosevelt increasingly emphasized athleticism, militarism, and ruggedness as the key to saving middle- and upper-class white men from effeminacy and weakness. The masher embodied neither of these competing masculine models. Rather, he represented much that was potentially harmful or ridiculous about uncontrolled white masculinity. The masher was lascivious and unrestrained, even effeminate, more interested in appeasing his vanity and following his sexual desires than practicing either the cool self-control or rugged self-sufficiency that many white Americans saw as essential elements of masculinity.
The legal response to mashing began as early as the 1880s when zealous police officers started arresting mashers in places like Chicago and St. Louis using existing disturbance of the peace ordinances. At least 25 municipalities went on to consider new antimashing laws, to revise laws to include mashing behaviors, or to direct courts and law enforcement to reinterpret existing ordinances in order to arrest mashers. Houston was the first major city to implement a stand-alone antimashing ordinance when the city council passed a ban on “goo goo eyes” in 1905. Soon after, the mastermind of the Houston ordinance, T.H. Stone, was advising other cities on how to develop their own antimashing ordinances. By 1921, at least 15 towns and cities had officially passed new or revised ordinances designed to combat mashing. Such ordinances, as the Detroit Free Press put it, were designed to give police the “utmost power” in arresting mashers.
Antimashing ordinances and crackdowns were a response to critiques from urban reformers, women’s rights activists, and Progressive politicians of the time who couched the mashing crisis in the context of their larger reform efforts. For instance, Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Agency suggested that strengthening laws against rape and seduction, a key goal of many women’s rights activists, would also protect women from mashers’ random assaults on the street. In places where school-age girls were targets of intrusive behaviors, some boards of education suggested using new age-of-consent laws to prosecute the men who hung around schools and waited to accost young girls who emerged at the end of the day. Other places, like New York City, tackled mashing by expanding vagrancy or “move-on” ordinances that were designed to clear the streets of anyone deemed undesirable or unsightly. However, arrests under vagrancy laws were vulnerable to dismissal in court, leading Theodore Roosevelt, noted Progressive and then-governor of New York, to call on the state legislature to explicitly ban mashing in 1900.
While antimashing laws and police crackdowns appeased activists, they did not guarantee that mashers were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced smoothly or to constituents’ satisfaction. Despite the groundswell of support for tougher responses to mashing, when police began arresting white men for mashing and courts began fining them, they were sometimes met with resistance. In an early example from 1887, a justice in the New York police court who had fined a man ten dollars for “insulting and annoying School Girls” found himself on the receiving end of criticism from local reporters. He defended his decision to Mayor Abram Hewitt by asserting, “I will mete out such punishment as I think the case warrants, even should I displease the Reporter of the ‘World.’” On the other hand, if residents complained about troublesome sections of town or thoroughfares that were popular with mashers, there was no guarantee that the police would take these complaints seriously. A New York resident reported to local law enforcement that a particular Harlem bridge was often lined with “tramps, drunken loafers, and ribald young men” that made crossing unpleasant. According to the resident, “Women and young girls make its passage only at the expense of lewd glances, insulting words, and indecent jostlings.” When a police officer investigated, he found this description to be “utterly untrue” and took no action.
White citizens also used disorderly conduct and antimashing sentiment to try to clear the streets of anyone but themselves and thus to assert their dominance over public spaces. For example, an anonymous New York resident asked the police to clear his neighborhood of “alot of colored would be dudes who congregate in this block.” These men blocked the sidewalks, he alleged, and “there is no white lady passing through there that is not insulted.” This attempt to rile up New York City law enforcement fell flat. The local police captain who investigated the complaint reported that “147 colored families” lived in the neighborhood and acknowledged that these Black families were “nearly if not quite all respectable and … entitled to some privileges on the street and sidewalks where they live.” However, complaints like this, which appealed to white supremacist beliefs about the inherent innocence of white womanhood and the inherent brutality of Black masculinity, were a major reason why Black Americans and Black women’s clubs rarely supported the expansion of police power to crack down on sexual violence, fearing new laws would be used to target Black men and protect only white women.
When law enforcement and judges chose to crack down on mashing, they soon encountered another problem: the reluctance of women to report and testify against mashers. In 1901, Chicago Chief of Police Francis O’Neill practically begged women to come forward with charges against mashers. “While of course I know that the masher is more or less annoying to women, no complaints have been made to me,” he explained to the Chicago Daily Tribune. “I do not see how we can do much unless complaints are handed in.” City officials’ frustrations led some to blame women for the mashing problem. W.L. Bodine, a superintendent in the Chicago public school system, argued the city “would be ridden of mashers if women would be brave enough” to alert the police and testify in court. “The entire question of checking mashers,” Bodine insisted, “is up to Chicago womanhood.”
Women had good reason to fear the notoriety that could come with testifying against mashers. Women who accused men of mashing regularly found themselves blamed for the men’s behaviors. Some judges went so far as to suggest that women accused mashers to get their “names and pictures in the newspapers.” In other cases, women found themselves on trial for their conduct. A New York woman confronted a display of white male solidarity when she tried to turn a masher in to the police. When asked to account for his actions, the masher had asked the policeman, “You can dope what she is, can’t you? Why, she gimme the lamp!” To translate, the masher accused the woman of looking at him and, thus, encouraging him. The white police officer sided with the masher and told the woman to “beat it.” Similarly, near the end of the antimashing crusades, a woman brought a case against a man who she said pinched her leg in a movie theater. By the end of the court proceedings, the accused had been freed and his accuser had herself been charged with disorderly conduct. The man claimed she had been the one who rubbed his leg, not the other way around. Black women may have been especially nervous that such a fate might befall them. The relative paucity of Black women’s accounts of mashing in Progressive Era newspapers may be in part the result of their anxieties about being labeled sexually immoral if they came forward with stories of sexual violence. Indeed, the white press often portrayed white women accusers as sexually suspect or immoral — suggesting that white women’s fashions were too “extreme” or their glances too inviting — so it would not be surprising if Black women feared the same and worse.
Still, there are examples of Black women demanding legal and state protection from white mashers. In 1924, the Chicago Defender reported that Estelle Richardson, “a musician and a young woman of culture,” confronted a white masher on a New York subway car. The man, John Elliot, “attempted to flirt” with Richardson on the subway and made “insulting remarks.” When she rebuffed his advances, Elliot threatened, “If you were in Georgia, I would have you strung up.” Richardson quickly left the train and managed to grab Elliot, with the help of a white female passenger, and held him until police came to arrest him. Elliot was sentenced to the workhouse, and the judge who oversaw the sentencing congratulated Richardson on her “pluck.” Despite the positive feedback from the court, Elliot’s reaction to Richardson’s rebuke highlights the cost Black women faced if they reported white mashers. Elliot’s choice of words alluded to lynching, reflecting the way white men’s sexual insinuations in public were also racialized when they targeted Black women. Reports of Elliot’s violent threats could have convinced other Black women it was better to ignore insults from white men than reprimand them publicly.
As it became clear that white men, whether policemen or strangers on the street, could not be relied on to protect white women, let alone women of color, women began to argue for taking matters into their own hands. Prominent clubwomen in some cities called on law enforcement to enlist women to help catch and arrest mashers. Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh hired women as decoys to entrap mashers on the street. By 1915, several cities had hired or were considering hiring women as official police officers with the ability to arrest mashers on the spot. While most of the first women police officers were white, Black communities in the urban North also called on police departments to employ Black women as police officers in hopes they could better protect African American women from urban dangers. As the Chicago Defender explained in 1914, Black women police officers would be able to “mingle with the crowds on the street, in the cars, in the public and private parks and places of amusement to protect the women of the race from those who go beyond ‘mashing’ and insult the girls and women of the race.” By the late 1920s, Black policewomen were reportedly helping to investigate vice in dance halls in New York, patrolling the West Park district of Chicago in an attempt to eradicate mashers, and arresting white men who bothered Black women on streetcars in Washington, DC.
When all else failed, women turned to self-defense tactics to protect themselves from mashers and assaults on the street. Historian Wendy Rouse suggests self-defense became “a means for white women to empower themselves against their alleged natural protectors — white men.” As one Los Angeles woman put it after she attacked a would-be masher, “I didn’t see anyone to protect me, so I protected myself.” White male–owned newspapers did not always take their efforts seriously, gleefully reporting how women stuck mashers with hatpins, hit them with umbrellas, and even used their fists or martial arts like jiujitsu. Still, working-class women particularly embraced self-defense to combat mashers. For instance, Chicago’s Day Book celebrated the strength, bravery, and quick-wittedness of working women who physically fought off unwanted advances. As one young telephone operator argued, she had no qualms about “smashing her handbag” over a masher’s head and “pummeling him with her fists.” Black women also sometimes found that only they could save themselves from white mashers. In 1928, as the antimashing crusades had all but disappeared, the Chicago Defender cheered Helen Waters, who “battered” a white masher’s “face and body” when he touched her knee in an insulting gesture. While these piecemeal, individual responses to mashing may not have had long-lasting effects on mashing’s prominence, they do confirm the numbers and varieties of women who denounced mashing as an inappropriate display of masculine entitlement.
While none of the tactics for eradicating the masher’s intrusive behaviors proved entirely successful, the nationwide organized response to mashing was unique to the Progressive Era. At no time in the United States before or since has there been such a widespread condemnation of men’s stranger intrusions or such a robust set of legal and extralegal frameworks for addressing those behaviors.
From Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States by Molly M. Brookfield. Copyright © 2026 by Molly M. Brookfield. Used by permission of the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press.
