Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment, which includes sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature, was part of the wider realm of American power relations and gender dynamics long before it came to be legally defined in the 1970s. Because prevailing gender roles defined the world of economic production and exchange as the domain of men well into the twentieth century, the workplace was a traditionally homosocial male space. Thus, women who challenged their prescribed domestic roles faced the possibility of harassment. Although women have engaged in acts of sexual harassment, such actions have primarily been used by men in public arenas as a mechanism designed to keep women “in their place.” Legal controversies involving sexual harassment thus became closely intertwined with larger cultural issues over sex discrimination, women's rights, and appropriate male conduct.

American women's challenges to the notion of the all-male workplace developed along with organized women's rights activism itself. As early as the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, Lucretia Mott urged the necessity of “securing to woman an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce” (Kerber and DeHart, 209). Women's growing presence in the workforce during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly as a result of the expansion of the service sector, raised concerns over workplace equality and conduct.

At the same time, feminists of the early twentieth century began emphasizing women's right to control their own bodies. But into the mid–twentieth century, women in the United States were frequently blamed for enticing men to rape them, and they were expected to tolerate sexual taunts as natural male behavior. President John F. Kennedy began to address the issue of women's workplace rights in 1961 by appointing a commission on the status of women, led by the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This commission was instrumental in the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the inclusion of sexual discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the attention to sex discrimination in the activities of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, established in 1965. [Page 417]But while these measures established what became the legal basis for sexual-harassment litigation, they did not make sexual harassment specifically a matter of public concern.

Sexual harassment began to emerge as a public issue beginning in the late 1960s, when the resurgent feminist movement encouraged broad public discussion not only of traditional workplace issues such as equal opportunity and equal pay, but also of sexual issues such as rape and the objectification of women, such as in pornography. Activists also criticized what they considered the conventional and sometimes boorish male behavior that underlay men's power, urging men to embrace models of male behavior more sensitive to women's concerns, needs, and aspirations. Better educated than the working women of earlier generations, women of the late-twentieth-century workplace brought with them a sharpened awareness of the relation between male sexuality and male power, a heightened sensitivity to the routine sexual harassment to which they were subjected, and a growing desire to reform conventional patterns of male workplace conduct.

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