On Tuesday, February 27, 1923, Washington's afternoon papers carried the same story. A new Anti-Flirt Club had formed in the city, and its secretary, Miss Helen Brown of 639 Longfellow Street, said she and its other members were tired of being annoyed by flirtatious motorists. The Evening Star called the club a "passive offensive against the curbstone loafer and flirtatious motorist." A committee with banners and anti-flirt pins would visit any women's club willing to help, and an Anti-Flirt Week would begin on March 4.
The Washington Daily News counted ten members, aged 18 to 29, and printed their names and addresses. The president was Alice Reighly of 1409 Harvard Street. Photographers posed the members in sashes that read "Anti-Flirt Club."
Ten rules
The complaint behind the club was real. During the war, drivers had been encouraged to offer lifts to people on foot, and men in cars had kept up the habit for other reasons. The club's answer was a list of ten rules, and every one was addressed to women. Don't flirt. Don't accept rides from flirting motorists. Don't go out with men you don't know, since they may be married. Don't smile at flirtatious strangers; save smiles for people you know. Rule five read: "Don't wink. A flutter of one eye may cause a tear in the other."
Helen Fetter, who wrote the Star's column for girls, reprinted the list and took it seriously. She judged three of the rules the most practical: the ones about strange men, about collecting admirers, and about older men who took a fatherly interest. The others, she thought, were so familiar that no girl could plead ignorance of them. The most important rule, in her view, had been left off. A girl kept busy enough would have no use for the list at all.
Within days the club had a sponsor. Manuel Herrick of Oklahoma, whose single term in Congress ended that week, wrote to Brown approving the organization. He suggested that any young man wishing to call on a member should first submit a complete history of himself for the club to verify, and that any escort who misbehaved be blacklisted by all the girls. When Herrick addressed the members in early March, wire stories described the club as pretty government workers. He warned them that a young man offering a girl a ride was not doing it simply to save her a walk. "I may be a nut, but I am a hard one to crack," he added.
New York, three months earlier
Washington's club was not the first. On November 20, 1922, five men met at the Hotel Biltmore in New York and organized an Anti-Flirt Association under the slogan "Jail the Flirt." The plan was to educate public opinion until a woman would consider it her duty to prosecute any masher who forced his attentions on her. Two nights later the association chose an insignia for its buttons: a lizard, standing for the masher, pinned to the ground by a hatpin in a crusader's hand. An editorial in Elmira, New York, endorsed the idea. A nice woman naturally dreaded the publicity of court, the editors granted, but if she did nothing she left the man free to bother someone else.
The association's secretary was named as James Madison. When the Brooklyn Eagle tried to learn more, the only James Madison in the telephone directory was a vaudeville writer, who denied any connection with "such foolishness." The Biltmore did not know where anyone from the movement could be found. Madison is also the family name in Booth Tarkington's novel The Flirt, which Universal had filmed and was releasing that winter. No source found for this essay connects the New York group to Universal, so the coincidence is noted here, not explained.
The reveal
On Friday, March 9, the Daily News ran a front-page account by Leonard Hall of how the Washington club had come about.
"The most successful publicity hoax in recent Washington history"
According to Hall, Moore's Rialto Theater had booked Universal's new film, The Flirt. The studio's local exploitation agent, Miss H. R. Merrill, and the Rialto's publicity director, L. G. Evans, worked out a plan to promote it. Merrill recruited about a dozen young women, had banners sewn, and telephoned the three afternoon papers. All three printed the story. Hall wrote that the Daily News grew suspicious and dropped it after the first day, while the others kept going and the news syndicates carried the photographs across the country. Some 4,000 anti-flirt buttons went onto lapels along F Street.
The Rialto's ads in the Star picked up the club's language. The one that ran on Saturday, March 10, promised that the heroine's fickleness had made her an anti-flirt for the rest of her life, and that audiences would learn "it doesn't hurt to flirt if you don't flirt to hurt." The film opened the next day.
Hall did not say where Reighly worked. In 2021, the Washington Post columnist John Kelly found that she and another member, Kate S. Smith, were employed by the Interstate Film Corporation.
Same direction
Whoever believed in it, the Washington club was built to look like a genuine reform movement, and that is how it was received. A congressman wrote to it. A women's columnist graded its rules. Papers from Alabama to Oklahoma printed its photograph. To sound convincing in 1923, an organization against street harassment needed only a list of instructions for women: where to look, when to smile, which rides to refuse.
The New York association, real or not, aimed at the man. Even so, its remedy began with the woman, and with her duty to go to court.
Chicago's council had answered the hatpin with a rule about the pin, and none about the men it was used against. Thirteen years later, the hatpin turned up only as a drawing on a button. The rules had moved from the pin to the person wearing it.
Women had other answers to the masher than a pin or a list. Some learned to throw him over a shoulder. Jujutsu and boxing, and the worry that followed women into the gym, come next.