Sexual Harassment in the United States. Mary Welek Atwell

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Sexual Harassment in the United States - Mary Welek Atwell


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as important as naming sexual harassment was providing legal reasoning to establish its illegitimacy. Based on the notion that women had a “right to work free of unwanted sexual advances” advocates and activists developed the argument that sexual harassment was analogous to racial harassment and that both were forms of discrimination prohibited by civil rights law.14 Just as racial discrimination contributes to inequality and could keep members of minority groups out of the workplace, sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination could keep women out of the workplace or relegate them to less desirable jobs. While those who refused to take sexual ←9 | 10→harassment seriously preferred to defend the conduct as just regular old hanky-panky, by contrast, feminist analysis emphasized “unsolicited, non-reciprocal male behavior that asserts women’s sex role over her function as a worker.”15 Catharine MacKinnon, the intellectual architect of legal definitions of sexual harassment focused on how it involves dominance, impersonal contempt, and entitlement and how it reinforces sexual inequality.16 In other words, just as rape is about power not about sexual attraction, sexual harassment is also more about power than about sex. Both serve as instruments in maintaining a patriarchal society.

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      Part of the struggle for gender-based justice involves contextual reasoning—providing evidence from the lives of real women. As campaigns against rape and domestic violence have demonstrated, women’s collective experience with abuses based on male power can also shape the laws against sexual ←11 | 12→harassment. The current #MeToo and Time’s Up movements are ongoing examples of the strength of sharing incidents. Likewise, consciousness raising, which is also manifested in the contemporary movements, provides support to individuals and reveals the power of numbers across regions and social classes.


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