Sexual Harassment in the United States. Mary Welek Atwell
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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 to keep women subordinate in the workplace, to maintain the privileges and benefits of male domination and control.9 Cochran notes too that “sex-role spillover” is another characteristic of sexual harassment. Men expect female employees to perform traditional domestic duties—making coffee, taking out their laundry, boosting their egos, meeting their emotional needs—generally serving as the “office wife.” Why not also include sex?10
Although the behavior was as old as human history, the importance of providing a name and a legal definition cannot be overstated. It seems that the first use of the term “sexual harassment” came in an organizing letter sent out by the Human Affairs Program at Cornell University in 1975.11 Within the next year, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Harper’s magazine featured stories and spread the use of the terminology. In 1977, Ms magazine published a cover story entitled “Sexual Harassment on the Job and How to Stop It.”12 The word was out that sexual harassment was a problem that demanded attention.
Until it had a name, it was easy to trivialize women’s experience as a breach of social etiquette or as “boys will be boys.” Naming sexual harassment was critical to making the problem a public issue. As Abigail Saguy points out, identifying sexual harassment challenged cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the workplace. It transformed how women could respond to advances at work from self-blame to righteous anger. She claims it also helped to change men’s view (or at least the views of some men) from feelings of entitlement to feelings of guilt.13