Molly M. Brookfield is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of the South, familiarly known as Sewanee, in Tennessee. She writes and teaches at the intersections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history, urban and cultural history, and women’s and gender studies.
Her book project, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press in September 2026.
Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.
Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans’ experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.
Preorder Watching the Girls Go By now.
Before joining the faculty at Sewanee, Brookfield earned her PhD in the joint program in History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She also holds an MA in Cultural Heritage Studies from University College London and a BA in History from Macalester College. She worked for several years in museums, archives, and historic sites.
Short Bio (80 words)
Molly M. Brookfield is Assistant Professor of U.S. History and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of the South. She teaches courses in gender history, urban history, U.S. cultural history, and feminist studies. She researches histories of sexual violence and masculinity in the United States. Her book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, charts the normalization of men’s harassment of women in public space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Molly M. Brookfield 