Review of Isaias J. McCaffery, "Mashers, Dudes, and Street Loafers:The Harassment of Kansas Women inLate-Nineteenth-Century Public Spaces." Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 46, no. 4. (Winter 2023-24): 210–229.
By Katie Sauter and Nora Crowley
In the article “Mashers, Dudes, and Street Loafers: The Harassment of Kansas Women in Late-Nineteenth-Century Public Spaces,” published in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains in its winter 2023-2024 issue, Isaias J. McCaffery addresses how the women of Kansas became increasingly harassed in public spaces, with there being little to no protection against it. McCaffery is a professor of history at Independence Community College. His research specializes in various demographics in the Midwest, including women. What McCaffery argues in this article is that while women in Kansas became more involved in public life outside of the home, street harassment became more widespread and normalized with no intervention by authorities, displaying the role of patriarchy in women’s everyday lives.
McCaffery shows just how normalized this torment was by men identified as dudes, mashers, and street loafers. To properly showcase these examples, we need to know what these slang terms mean. Street loafers were lower-class men who were the most frequent nuisance to women in public spaces. They would inhabit spaces such as street corners and the exteriors of businesses. Street loafers insulted women as they walked by. These insults were often extremely vulgar and distressing to the victims. The second term was the “dude.” Dudes were described as wealthy, fashionable, and dull-witted. Although capable of harassment, they were often perceived as more annoying than an actual threat because they were too stupid or, as McCaffery writes, “too weak to accomplish any harm.”[1] The third term was the masher. These men were predators who often stalked women before physically harming them. Mashers could be from any social class or age, and were not restrained geographically by street corners. They harassed women in any public space. Members of all three groups believed they, as men, had the right over women’s bodies. They experienced simultaneous attraction and resentment towards women, and through degrading women, they felt a sense of power.
Harassment was well-documented in Kansas newspapers; however, few solutions were introduced in the state. Statements were made by authorities that street loafers were to be arrested. But little action was taken due to limited resources and ineffective laws. Women were advised to travel with male chaperones. However, this was impractical for unmarried women or women without male relatives. During this time, the prevailing mindset in Kansas and the general United States was that women were meant to be under masculine protection; they were a protected class, not fully autonomous citizens with free agency. The advised “feminine” response to verbal harassment was to ignore it, but this did not stop it from happening. That is not to say that the women of Kansas did not fight back. The strategy of using a hairpin against mashers originated in Kansas from Leoti Blaker of Oskaloosa. While many states tried to ban women from using hairpins to stab their harassers, Kansas did not do so, and instead applauded it. Women were compelled to use violence in their lives, which displays how useless authorities were; they felt they had to take their safety into their own hands.
After World War I, terms such as masher, dude, and street loafer left the public vocabulary, but the harassment itself remained. McCaffery cites a 2010 poll where 81% of female respondents had received sexually explicit comments from strangers. In another poll, 90% of female respondents answered that harassment was still a widespread problem, while 60% of males answered that it was not. Knowing that this issue did not emerge recently shows how normalized the harassment of women has been in history, but by understanding this history and continuity, more effective solutions can be put in place.
[1]McCaffery, Isaias J. "Mashers, Dudes, and Street Loafers: The Harassment of Kansas Women in Late-Nineteenth-Century Public Spaces." Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 46, no. 4. (Winter 2023-24): 210–229.