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

by Molly M. Brookfield

Genres: History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

Published September 8, 2026

Reviews

[Annotations&Air]

Street harassment is so ordinary that we often treat it as inevitable. Watching the Girls Go By asks us to consider how it became ordinary in the first place.



Molly M. Brookfield traces more than a century of street harassment in the United States, from the 1860s through the 1980s, examining the ways women’s increasing presence in public spaces was met with attempts to remind them that those spaces did not fully belong to them. Catcalling, staring, following, and other intrusions emerge here as more than individual acts of bad behavior. They are part of a larger history of who has been permitted to move freely through public life and who has been made to feel watched, vulnerable, or out of place.



What I found particularly compelling is Brookfield’s attention to race and class. She complicates any easy narrative about men harassing women by showing how white, middle-class men’s behavior could be normalized or excused while men of color and working-class men were constructed as uniquely dangerous sexual threats. The history of protecting women, particularly white women, has never been separate from the history of racialized policing and social control.



The book also captures something that remains painfully recognizable: the cumulative weight of behavior routinely dismissed as harmless. An individual comment or whistle may appear insignificant when isolated from everything around it. Across years, generations, and entire communities, these encounters help determine whose comfort is prioritized and whose freedom requires constant calculation.



Brookfield has written a thoughtful and deeply researched history of something hiding in plain sight. Watching the Girls Go By ultimately asks us to think differently about public space itself: who gets to occupy it without explanation, who learns to navigate it defensively, and how behaviors dismissed as ordinary can reinforce much larger inequalities.



Thank you to the University of North Carolina Press for making this copy available to me for early reading and review. Available on 9.8.2026 everywhere books are sold.

[Rachael]

Watching the Girls Go By highlights the sad realisation that urban streets of America can be a highly problematic space for women facing street harassment. Since mass urbanisation, American streets have become a highly policed and surveilled space for what it means to be seen as a woman. Chronologically covering the 1860s-1980s, what I found most interesting was how this policing and what was considered acceptable has changed over time, due to the cultural context. While Watching the Girls Go By does try to address these male intrusions across race, and I appreciate the author's attempt in highlighting the racial dynamics, it is very Black and white in doing so and seemingly ignores this phenomenon impacting non-Black or white women.

Informative and thoroughly researched, Watching the Girls Go By sadly highlights the lived experience of most women today, as we're subjected to ogling and wolf-whistling while trying to go about our day.

[heyheyhey]

An incredibly fascinating history of American street harassment and the various social movements that have accompanied it. I appreciated that the book was just as thorough in its examination of race as it was gender, and captured nuanced topics while remaining incredibly accessible and interesting. Yet, it never felt like it was over explaining the theory it was using! I really loved this book and appreciated the epilogue which drew ties to the modern incel movement. I’m itching for a tie in or even a continuation which explores online harassment as a continuation of the masher and girl-watcher movements discussed in this book.

[Susie Dumond]

Damn this made me want to go back to gender studies class. My heart raced every time she said "hegemonic masculinity". So good!!

[Larry]

Epitome of an outstanding academic work of history.