Goo-Goo Eyes Not Permitted: Discourses of Street Harassment and Unwanted Looking in 20th-Century United States

As single women moved by the tens of thousands into industrializing American cities looking for work, they were not always welcome. Historians like Estelle Freedman and Judith Walkowitz—as well as feminist theorists, legal scholars, and activists—have examined how street harassment served as one manifestation of white male sexual dominance on city streets in this period. In the United States, so-called “mashers” ogled women in public places, sparking a spate of protests and new laws to protect women from unwanted looking.  This paper investigates how looking came to be defined as a form of harassment, comparing municipal ordinances that targeted mashers in three cities.  While Chicago police reinterpreted the existing disorderly conduct ordinance, Detroit and Houston updated their municipal codes to prohibit ogling and to specifically outlaw men from making “goo-goo eyes” at women in public, respectively. These ordinances helped to redefine public space as they regulated who had the right to approach strangers in public and whether such advances could be rebuffed. Through an analysis of the creation, enforcement, and eventual mockery of these anti-street harassment ordinances, this paper illuminates the regulatory and social mechanisms that mediated women’s access to and power within public urban spaces in the modern United States.