There has been a great deal of talk in the papers about arresting
“mashers,” that is, young men who stand on the corners and pulverize
women, and a great many good people got the idea that it was unsafe to
travel the streets. This is not the case. A woman might travel all
day and half the night and not be insulted. Of course, once in a great
while, a woman will be insulted by a man, the same as a man will be by a
woman.
No woman, unless she throws out one eye, kind of cunning, is in danger
of having a male man throw out his other eye the same way. There has got
to be two parties to a mashing match, and one must be a woman. Too many
women act sort of queer just for fun, and the poor male man gets to
acting improper before he realizes the enormity of the crime, and then
it is everlastingly too late.
But a female masher, one who is thoroughly bad, like the male loafers
that have been driven from the corners, is a terror. She will insult a
respectable man and laugh at his blushes. One of them was arrested the
other day for playing her act on a policeman who was disguised as a
respectable granger from Stevens Point. These female mashers are a
tornado.
Why, one of them met a respectable church member the other night,
and asked him how his liver complaint was. He was a man who had
been troubled with the liver complaint, and supposing she was some
acquaintance, he stopped on the corner and talked with the pullet for
about ten minutes, explaining to her the course of treatment he had used
to cure him, and dozens of people passing by that knew him, and knew
that she was clear off.
Finally she asked him if he wouldn't take her to a restaurant and buy
her a spring chicken and a small bottle. He told her if she would come
up to his house she should have a hen, and there were lots of bottles,
both large and small, that she was welcome to. She told him to go to
Hades, and he went in a drug store and asked a clerk who that lady was
he had been talking with, and when the clerk, who knew her, told him she
was a road agent, a street walker, a female masher, the old man had to
sit down on a box of drugs and fan himself with his hat.
We mention this to show that ladies are not the only portion of the
population that is liable to be accosted and insulted. The other night
a respectable merchant was going to the opera with a friend from the
country, when a couple of sirens met them and one said to the other,
“Look at his nibs,” and she locked arms with him and asked him if he was
not her own darling. He said his name was not “Nibs,” and he would have
to look at his memorandum book before he could tell whether he was her
darling or not, but from the smell of gin about her person he would
blush to extemporize.
We do not give his exact language, but in the heat of debate he shook
her and told her if she ever clawed on him again he would everlastingly
go and tell her parents. And while he was talking with her the other one
had seated herself beside his country friend on a salt barrel in front
of a grocery and was feeling in his vest pocket to see if he had any
cloves.
A female masher is much worse than a male masher as you can imagine.
Who ever heard of a male masher feeling in an unprotected female's vest
pocket for cloves? O, the men are simply unprotected, and at the mercy
of wicked, designing women, and the police ought to protect them.