is a book I wanted to write because, in my view, students and other informed people need to understand sexual harassment as a serious issue that may well have an impact on their lives and those of their friends and family. Public attention may focus on a Harvey Weinstein or on the Access Hollywood tape where Donald Trump bragged about groping women, but because the issue ←3 | 4→is so pervasive most victims will be our peers and colleagues, our neighbors, daughters, and cousins. Only a tiny percentage of sexual harassment targets will seek legal redress in the courts and only a small number of them will win a legal judgment. Thus if we want to grapple with the problem, it is preferable of figure out how to prevent and deter the behavior, rather than relying on the courts to punish the perpetrators after the fact. An end to sexual harassment requires an understanding of the cultural dynamics that allow it to exist and of strategies to challenge those cultural dynamics.
A first step to understanding the issue is defining the terms. A portion of this book will be devoted to the evolution of the law of sexual harassment—how the courts and the public came to understand it as a form of discrimination in employment and education. However, other terms are often confused or conflated with sexual harassment. Although most commentators would agree that there is a continuum of behaviors that fall under the heading of “sexual misconduct,” it is worth noting that at one end of the continuum one finds verbal comments that insult and degrade the target while at the other end of the continuum is sexual assault. Some perpetrators engage in behavior that runs the whole gamut (Harvey Weinstein comes to mind as a famous example); others confine themselves to disrespecting women in the workplace and making the targets’ lives painful and professionally uncomfortable. The latter conduct can create the hostile environment that the courts have defined as sexual harassment. While sexual assault is a criminal offense and may be punished accordingly, sexual harassment is dealt with as a civil matter. Offenders will not be sent to prison but they or their employer may be fined or given another civil penalty. The courts have not been crystal clear in defining how liable employers should be for the illegal acts of their employers. Yet in the contemporary world, at least some high profile employers (CBS, PBS, NBC, Fox News, and others) have assumed that the negative publicity that accompanies the presence of a powerful man accused of sexual harassment is not worth maintaining an ongoing relationship with the perpetrator. Some universities and the United States Congress have reached similar conclusions.
During the last several decades, a number of events have drawn our attention to the problem of sexual harassment. Many people said, “This has got to stop!” after they heard the story of Anita Hill or the stories of members of Congress or prominent figures in the media. We will see how military leaders have proclaimed “zero tolerance” for more than three decades. But voices on the other side have trivialized and downgraded the problem or called the truthfulness of the victims into question. Opponents of sexual harassment ←4 | 5→seem to have reached a new level of outrage and a much wider level of participation with the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. Will this be the moment that makes a difference? Will sexual harassment become unacceptable in all contexts? It remains to be seen whether we have reached a point where the environment for women becomes safe and comfortable, rather than hostile and demeaning.
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· 1 · patriarchy and sexual harassment
Sexual harassment did not begin when contemporary women began to complain about Harvey Weinstein. Reva Siegel writes that sexual harassment is a “social practice with a history.”1 In its history, women in subordinate positions—servants, slaves, domestic workers, unskilled factory laborers—had little recourse when men who controlled their workplace demanded sexual favors. As Augustus Cochran points out, the American economy until the New Deal era was characterized by little government regulation. Work was treated as a private relationship between employer and worker. Thus employees had only the protections that legislatures and courts chose to define. “Society’s agenda” determined what those protections would be,2 and virtually all of those who determined society’s agenda were male. Until the late twentieth century, workers’ protections did not include a right to be free from sexual harassment, although the problem existed and was described many decades earlier.
A 1910 government report, Women and Child Wage Earners, for example, asked the questions, “Is modern industry dangerous to the character of women? Are moral qualities affected?” In response the Bureau of Labor Statistics hypothesized that if men and women work together, “great laxity obtains” which threatens the virtue of young ladies through “obvious improprieties.”3 ←7 | 8→In offices and factories, careless behavior could occur and women would find it difficult to resist, especially if dependent on men for their jobs. The report was describing what would come to be known as sexual harassment, although it suggested that the real threat was to women’s “virtue,” and that the problem was one of moral laxity rather than discrimination and economic injustice. Also in the early twentieth century, groups such as the Immigrant Protective Association in Chicago, the Young Ladies’ Educational Society representing the needle trades, and the Women’s Trade Union League recognized the problem and tried to protect working women from their supervisors. Those who supported protective legislation that limited women’s working hours often expressed concern for the moral status of women and believed shielding them from “improper advances” was a matter of safeguarding their virtue, rather than dealing with a form of economic abuse.4
In the early 1970s, consciousness raising groups, speak-outs, and Take Back the Night rallies gave women the opportunity to voice their experiences with abusive behaviors such as rape and domestic violence. Joan Hoff asserts that until other more violent forms of sexual abuse were identified and addressed, sexual harassment received little attention, even though it was the most common and most subtle form of sexual exploitation of American women. Usually victims would endure harassing behavior in silence because it was hard to find the courage to speak out against pain and humiliation, especially as women’s voices were often not heard as authoritative.5 But groups like Working Women United did talk about abusive behavior in the workplace. Before it had the name “sexual harassment,” women spoke to each other about unwanted sexual advances and demands, as they did about the many other types of abusive behavior not taken seriously in a patriarchal society.
Like other forms of physical and psychological violence against women, sexual harassment cut across class and racial lines—it affected women, no matter the color of their collar or of their skin. And like other forms of violence against women, it involved basic personal integrity as well as economic survival.6 Many commentators have pointed out the irony that as women took on more jobs in traditionally male fields, especially but not exclusively in blue collar positions, they seemed to be making economic progress. However, men often greeted their new female colleagues with attempts to create an intimidating environment through “isolation, work sabotage, severe verbal abuse, and even physical violence.”7 Alice Kessler-Harris suggests that men resorted to harassment to discourage women and emphasize male solidarity. Suggestive remarks, threats, refusing to mentor women or even to help them learn ←8 | 9→necessary skills, interfering with their equipment—all were ways to assert a claim that the workplace was “masculine turf.”8 Some men seemed to believe that humiliation and hostility could keep women out of the factory or the mine and “in their place.” But many blue collar women, recognizing this strategy, helped to foster and spread the idea that sexual harassment was really not about sexual desire. Rather it was an effort
