Black Women x the Streets x Harassment

By Guest Contributor M Dot originally posted at New Model Minority

This “Black men walking on the outside of Black women on the street” business touched a cord here on my blog, and opened up a really interesting discussion on race, gender roles, Black men and women, and patriarchy. I plan on doing a some follow up posts to address some of the issues that came up. This post is one of them.

The issue that I want to address is how a woman’s ability TO BE IN THE STREET is connected to her ability to participate in public life, in Democracy.

Tonight I reread Cynthia Grant Bowman’s paper, “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women” which was published in the Harvard Law Review. I am going to provide some quotes from the paper then offer some comments.

Street Harassment and Liberty for Women

The liberty of women, in this most fundamental sense of freedom from restraint, is substantially limited by street harassment, which reduces their physical and geographical mobility and often prevents them from appearing alone in public places. In this sense, street harassment accomplishes an informal ghettoization of women — a ghettoization to the private sphere of hearth and home.

If we can’t be on the street, we can’t feel comfortable in public, if we can’t feel comfortable in public how will we participate in a democracy?

Working Definition of Street Harassment

Street harassment occurs when one or more strange men accost one or more women . . . in a public place which is not the woman’s/women’s worksite. Through looks, words, or gestures the man asserts his right to intrude on the woman’s attention, defining her as a sexual object, and forcing her to interact with him.

So, if I am on the street, and you are saying something to me, you are trying to FORCE me to interact with you. Patriarchy says that men, by virtue of simply being born biologically men have the right to dominate over women and children, in the home and the street. This street shit is patriarchy in action.

The Purpose of Harassment: “Know your place, Celie.”

The first function of public harassment is to reinforce spatial boundaries that drastically limit women’s “sphere.” It clearly stakes out public space as male space. Women who want to be outside their homes must do so at their own risk and with the full knowledge that at any time they can be publicly humiliated or “complimented.” Women are at all times subject to public scrutiny.

The purpose of men saying shit is to let me know that I am always on display and subjected to something popping off? Shit is tiring. It must be how Black men feel in terms of dealing with the police.

I Guess I am Supposed to “Play My Position”

Unlike men, women passing through public areas are subject to “markers of passage” that imply either that women are acting out of role simply by their presence in public or that a part of their role is in fact to be open to the public. These “markers” emphasize that women, unlike men, belong in the private sphere, the sphere of domestic rather than public responsibility. Ironically, men convey this message by intruding upon a woman’s privacy as she enters the public sphere.

I never tripped off of me not being allowed in the street as being connected to me needing to remain at home, as it is my “proper” place. But this makes sense.

Freedom, The Streets and Autonomy

Central to the freedom to be at ease in public spaces is the capacity to pass through them while retaining a certain zone of privacy and autonomy — a zone of interpersonal distance that is crossed only by mutual consent. If, by contrast, women are subject to violation of that zone of personal privacy when they enter public areas, that very invasion of privacy effectively drives women back into the private sphere, where they may avoid such violations. Thus, by turning women into objects of public attention when they are in public, harassers drive home the message that women belong only in the world of the private.

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