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Naming Sexual Harassment

Not only did the problem that Mechelle Vinson faced have no law. It also had no recognition, no politics, no movement, and no awareness in the nation. Perhaps most remarkably, it had no name. But events in early 1975 would soon give Vinson’s problem a name: sexual harassment.

The term sexual harassment apparently first appeared publicly in print in a letter of late March in 1975, written on the stationery of the Human Affairs Program of Cornell University and designed for wide distribution. It began, in the tone of grassroots organizing, with “Dear Sisters”:

Two weeks ago an Ithaca woman came to the Women’s Section of the Human Affairs Program for assistance. The woman, who is the sole support of her two children, was denied unemployment benefits because it was ruled that her reasons for leaving her job were “personal” and “non-compelling.”

She was forced to leave after eight years of service because of a pattern of sexual harassment by a male superior which caused her tension and anxiety so severe that she developed painful physical side effects. Her complaints concerning this behavior were treated lightly by her department and she was told that a mature woman should be able to handle such situations.

The naming of the problem and the Cornell letter marked the start of a movement. But the movement, even as it started, was on thin ground.

The Human Affairs Program was an odd annex of Cornell University. It had emerged as a curricular response by Cornell to the radicalism of the late 1960s. The program taught courses in such topics as prison reform, bank red-lining, and, in a new course developed in the fall of 1974 by a young teacher named Lin Farley, women and work. The letter that introduced the term sexual harassment had been drafted and signed by Farley and two of her fellow teachers in the program, Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigné, both young and committed to social change.

The letter had originated, albeit indirectly, from the program’s teaching and particularly from the opening days of Lin Farley’s course. While readying her classes on the topic, Farley had found preparation difficult. Data seemed thin, and analysis even thinner. Frustrated, Farley decided to turn, as she put it, to “consciousness-raising,” the emergent women’s movement strategy of asking women to talk about their lives, a strategy that Farley viewed as “a remarkable tool for unlocking that vast storehouse of women’s own experiences.”

This turn to consciousness-raising—C-R in the abbreviation of the day—meant that Farley and her students devoted one early class to telling their stories about what had happened to them in past jobs because they were women. For students at an Ivy League university, they were a diverse group: in race, an almost equal mix of black and white; in class, a range from rich to poor. By the time the conversation ended, Farley believed she had heard something absent from the scholarship on women and work: “Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behavior of men.”

To discover whether a pattern existed, Farley began asking around among working women. Then in March of 1975, Carmita Wood came to Farley with her story, too complicated to record in a one-page letter.

Wood’s story, which she would eventually spell out in legal documents but would never be able to prove conclusively, went briefly as follows: The lone support of two children, she had begun working eight years earlier, in 1966, in a lab at Cornell. She received one promotion in 1968 and another in 1971, making her the first woman to hold the post of administrative assistant for the lab. In recognition of her new-found stature, she became the second woman ever admitted to the Ithaca Management Club and, feeling a new level of security, she took out a $10,000 loan to remodel her home.

Soon, however, her sense of security began to fade. Her new job moved her to a new building and put her in frequent contact with the lab’s director. Although Wood did not know her new boss well, she had already had one worrying experience. In the fall of 1970, at a faculty cocktail party, she had walked to a patio where her boss was standing with his wife. When Wood said, “Good evening,” he replied by saying the same and also by reaching behind her and putting his hand on her bottom. Embarrassed, Wood quickly stepped away.

Wood’s promotion in 1971 meant that her boss would now begin making frequent business visits to her office. When he visited, she would later report, he would sometimes lean against her while she was seated at her desk. While he discussed business, he would press against her in a way that pinned her between his body and her desk, and he would peer at her body and clothes. At other times, as she recalled (and as two other lab employees eventually confirmed in sworn testimony), he would “stand with his hands shaking in his pockets and rock against the back of a chair, as if he were stimulating his genitals.” He also, as a number of employees observed, seemed to enjoy peering through a glass partition that allowed him to watch Wood and other women working in her vicinity. Wood’s worry increased after another employee, a maid, reported that during a Christmas party in 1972, Wood’s boss caught the maid alone in an elevator, put his arm on her shoulder, and tried to kiss her.

Wood’s difficulties with her boss reached their nadir, according to her story, at the next year’s Christmas party, which she was in charge of organizing. In mid-afternoon, her boss arrived along with about forty other party-goers. When he asked her to dance, she refused. He asked again. She refused again—partly because she was busy running the party. Then, after asking her yet again, she recounted, “he grabbed my arms and pulled me to the area where a few couples were dancing.”

What happened next she would eventually describe in sworn testimony:

During the course of the dance, he placed his hands under my sweater and vest which, when not so disturbed, extended well below my waist. He proceeded to place his hands up my back toward my shoulders. This raised my sweater and vest in such a manner that my back was exposed. He then rubbed his hands up and down my bare skin on my back.

One of her coworkers could see the anguish in Wood’s face: she seemed, the coworker thought, “about to cry.”

Wood felt publicly humiliated. After the dance she complained to at least two coworkers that her boss had a lot of “nerve” to embarrass her before all their colleagues. Less specifically, she complained also to her direct supervisor, who recalled that on several occasions during her employment Wood had mentioned that their boss had “looked at her and made her feel uncomfortable.” But what she recalled as complaints, he heard as humorous and casual comments that he “dismissed” (as he said in an affidavit) as “a diversion she enjoyed.” Her supervisor, who had praised her skills in working with others, did not recall hearing about the incident at the Christmas party (he was taking his son to a hockey practice at the time). In any event, his view was that both Wood and her coworkers were “very capable women,” as he put it, who were “capable of taking care of themselves, so to speak.” To take care of themselves, he suggested that they “try not to get into those situations.”

Not long after the Christmas party, Wood began intensifying her efforts to transfer to another part of the university. Also not long after the Christmas party, she began experiencing pain in her hand and arm, which became excruciating. Trips to several doctors provided no relief. Finally, in June of 1974, at about the time her boss was due to return to her building after a leave of absence, Wood resigned from her job. She had decided to go to Florida, hoping the warmer climate would ease her physical pain. But leaving her job was risky, particularly at that moment—the United States was in the midst of a recession, with unemployment running at high levels.

Almost immediately after Carmita Wood left her job at Cornell, the pain in her arm and hand disappeared. It never came back. Later, a psychotherapist told her that her pain had been a physical reaction to emotional stress on the job.

Blessed with no pain but cursed with no work, Wood tried to find a job. For a while she worked as a real estate agent but lost money. Finally, in late 1974, she decided to apply for unemployment insurance from the New York State Department of Labor. At a hearing there, she described quitting her job “for health reasons,” the real estate job at which she “didn’t sell a thing,” and her need, with two children to feed, for unemployment benefits.

Four days later, on December 30, 1974, she received a rejection from the hearing officer of the New York State Department of Labor, penned on a printed form in almost illegible scrawl. “You quit your job without good cause,” the official wrote, and continued on that she had quit “for personal non-compelling reasons” rather than health reasons and that she had failed to apply “for a leave of absence which would be available to” her.

Unless Wood could prove that she was compelled to leave, she could not receive benefits. She decided to appeal to a referee of the New York State Department of Labor. This time she came with two coworkers as witnesses to the events that had led to her distress. She also came with her direct supervisor, who made clear he viewed her not just as a satisfactory employee but as one he unsuccessfully had tried to help obtain a leave of absence and one he would recommend for further work at the university.

At this hearing, for the first time, Carmita Wood tried to tell her full story. The state government’s referee seemed to see the story as a chance for humor. After Wood described her disabling symptoms, the referee responded, “So you’re saying, in effect,” that her boss “was a pain in the neck”? When she explained that he treated women as second-class citizens, he asked, “Oh, so he’s one of these Male Chauvinist Pigs?” After hearing that one of Wood’s coworkers had threatened to resign if her boss did not stop touching her and that her boss was fifty-seven years old, the referee kept the tone jocular: “Well, he’s young enough to be interested, anyway.”

Given the referee’s tone, and the difficulty it created for telling her story, Wood could not have been surprised when she received another rejection. Dated March 7, 1975, it reiterated the earlier judgment, this time not scrawled but typed: Wood had left her job for “personal non-compelling reasons.” She had no claim. Her last chance, if she had one, would be to go to court.

A few days later, Wood went to the Women’s Section of the Human Affairs Program for assistance, where she met Farley and then Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigné. Wood told them she was no feminist activist—“not a bra burner,” she said, as Meyer later recalled. But she had heard that the Women’s Section was interested in this type of problem.

Farley, Meyer, and Sauvigné decided to help Wood: to find her a lawyer, hold a rally, gather support, and start a movement. They decided to draft the letter that began “Dear Sisters.” But before they could write about the problem, it needed a name.

SEEKING A NAME FOR THIS PROBLEM, Farley, Meyer, and Sauvigné gathered a small group in their office. Should they call the problem “sexual coercion”? “Sexual intimidation”? “Sexual blackmail”? “Your boss propositioning you”? None rang true. But one phrase had the right sound. It was not too forceful and not too petty: sexual harassment.

Although it contained the spark of a new idea, it contained oddly little tinder. The letter did not say what the superior had done. The letter left everything to the powers of suggestion: this problem was about the sort of situations that society expected could be handled by a mature woman.

Despite its lack of detail, the letter continued—with typographical errors that made its haste apparent—to suggest that this woman was not alone:

We understand that this situation is one in which working women continually find themselves and that forcing a woman to make a choice between self-respect and economic security is impossible—whichever choice she makes she will loose [sic]. A woman’s role in any kind of work situation should be based soley [sic] on her ability to perforn [sic] her job—not on whether she maintains a sexual rapport with the boss.

Beyond the typos, the letter’s haste showed also in a claim that was more tentative than it sounded: “this situation is one in which working women continually find themselves.” In fact, the authors of the letter were writing with anecdotal evidence from a small group and their own experience.

Hearing stories like Wood’s had brought back their stories. Karen Sauvigné found herself recalling an experience from a few years earlier in graduate school: She had been offered a five-nights-a-week waitressing job in the restaurant downstairs from her apartment. Soon, she found her boss assuming he could just pop upstairs to visit her. She was mature enough to keep him out, but he cut her work to one night a week.

Susan Meyer remembered her first real job, working as a “girl Friday” in an office with five men in the Chrysler Building in New York, and knowing she was supposed to be a good sport about all the sexual jokes aimed at her, jokes she knew she was supposed to join but that made her feel awkward. She remembered particularly the time she was alone in the office with one man, who began joking, then leaning against her, with his arms on both sides, pinning her against a wall. She couldn’t escape. She thought, If I were more sophisticated, I could handle this.

Part of the letter’s goal was to invite more memories, more stories, perhaps even more legal cases. Stretching a bit, the letter continued: “Women are organizing to fight this kind of exploitation both by legal and political means.” Aptly, the letter reached its climactic plea for help:

We know of no precedent for this sort of action and we would deeply appreciate your passing on to us any information you may have about similar cases and/or about the physical and psychological effects of prolonged stress upon women. The women we are working with are trying to build a strong organizing campaign and a strong legal case—they need alot of input from other women to do this effectively.

Farley, Meyer, and Sauvigné sent their plea to about a hundred progressive lawyers around the country. The names of these “Dear Sisters” had been gathered by Sauvigné during her work as a legal staffer for two previous employers. One was the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, where she worked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a professor of law at Columbia University. The other, which had offices in the same building as the ACLU, was the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council—abbreviated LSCRRC and pronounced “lis-krik”—a hotbed for young law students, often interns who wanted to change the world.

In response to their plea, only one lawyer wrote back. But a letter came back from a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student in political science at Yale University who had spent a year in a law school program. Her name was Catharine Alice MacKinnon, and she had come to the Upstate Women’s Center in Ithaca earlier that year as a singer and guitar player in a duo that traveled the Northeast to play at weddings, events, and coffeehouses. She put her name on a list for a newsletter, and Sauvigné, who had heard MacKinnon’s name through LSCRRC in New York and met her when she sang in Ithaca, added her name to the list for the “Dear Sisters” letter. When MacKinnon received that letter, she would always recall, it “just exploded in my mind.” This, she thought, is what the situation of women is really about—and everything that the law of sex discrimination made it difficult if not impossible to address. She wrote back to the Human Affairs Program at Cornell, saying she wanted to help. But as of the spring of 1975, MacKinnon’s hopes to become a lawyer battling sex discrimination were being frustrated by Yale Law School, which kept refusing to admit her for a degree that would let her practice law.

WHEN MACKINNON WAS BORN, in October of 1946, her father was a young lawyer involved in electoral politics. Already a Minnesota state legislator, George E. MacKinnon was then fighting the last weeks of a political campaign that would win him a seat in the U.S. Congress. There he became friends with another first-term congressman, Richard M. Nixon. Sitting side by side as Republican members of the House Labor Committee, they worked together drafting the Taft-Hartley Act, which protected employees from being forced to join unions. Nixon and MacKinnon also collaborated on an investigation of Alger Hiss for allegedly passing U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union.

Just after his daughter’s second birthday, Congressman MacKinnon lost his bid for re-election. With his wife and daughter, he returned to the Lake Minnetonka area to become a local lawyer in the rural district that he had represented. More than twenty years would pass before his return to long-term work in Washington, as a judge appointed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1969 by newly elected President Richard Nixon.

Catharine MacKinnon lived for sixteen years in that farming community, attending public schools and imbibing a sense of heartland values. When discussion arose that his bright daughter “Kitty” (as they called her) should go to a private school to put her on a fast track, her father was adamant: the public school that was good enough for the local kids was good enough for his kids, and he didn’t want any child of his growing up to think she was better than anybody else.

From her mother and grandmothers, Catharine developed a sense of women’s work and worth. Even her name represented a women’s tradition. She was named for her maternal grandmother, Alice S. Davis, and her grandmother’s best friend, Catharine (“Kitty”) Pierce, head tutor in art history at Radcliffe College. From her paternal grandmother, beginning at age six, Catharine MacKinnon learned knitting and quilting. When her family visited Minnesota state fairs, as they often did, she admired the embroidery and the appliqué, the scalloping and cross-stitching, as art. When her maternal grandmother made a complex quilt of blue cornflowers and yellow daisies as a gift for her daughter, she called it her “life’s work.” And Smith College, which Catharine MacKinnon, her mother, and both her namesakes attended, set a context for believing, as she would later put it, “that women were real.”

Catharine’s father often took her to the offices where he worked. By the time she was entering grade school, that was the office of the federal prosecutor in Minneapolis. His best-known investigation became a classic battle against gangsters and racketeering. He was known widely in the state as the prosecutor who “put Kid Cann in jail.” When he took her to work, he never gave her the sense that she could not become whatever she chose, although he assumed that she would marry and have children. In the fall of 1958, when she was twelve, she went out with him on the campaign trail after he had been drafted by Republicans to run for governor—a race he lost.

At Smith College, where Catharine MacKinnon enrolled in 1964, she majored in government. Studying with the inspirational professor Leo Weinstein, who taught both constitutional law and classical political theory, MacKinnon wrote a paper in which she discussed the First Amendment theories of a professor at Yale Law School, Thomas Emerson, whom Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP had enlisted in the battle against race discrimination. After she mailed her paper to Emerson, he invited her to meet with him at Yale Law where, as she later recalled, “he took me seriously. We discussed all the issues. And he was warm and great.” Her admiration for Emerson’s work, which combined theory with practice, made MacKinnon want to study with him. She applied to Yale, wanting to study both law and politics. After Yale’s highly competitive law school turned her down for admission for the fall of 1969 (its enrollment was 87 percent male), she won admission to Yale’s graduate program in political science.

In 1970 and 1971, Yale Law again rejected MacKinnon for its three-year degree program. Deans at the law school, in conversations that she recalls, gave various reasons. “By the time you applied” in 1969, she was told in a sentence she remembers verbatim, “we had already accepted all our women.” Her 1970 turndown was linked to a grade of B at Smith College in graphic arts. In 1971, a dean told her that Yale Law was offering places particularly to black women and to men returning from Vietnam.

In 1972 Yale Law admitted her to a new one-year program, the Master of Studies in Law or MSL, designed for nonlegal professionals. As that year ended, MacKinnon still wanted to enroll for a three-year law degree. The school’s recently named dean for admissions, James Thomas, urged her not to apply immediately because, as she recalled later, “it’s in opposition to the whole purpose of the MSL—that somebody will use it as a back door into the law school.” She needed a formal waiver to permit her to apply. Then, to her surprise, Dean Thomas told her that her previous applications had not received a full review by the school’s admissions committee because a committee chair had taken her file out of the process multiple times and prevented it from circulating. MacKinnon later heard that the reason was opposition to her feminism. Following the guidance of the new admissions dean, and the permission from a new chair of admissions to apply after she completed the MSL year and a hiatus year, she applied for the fall of 1975. Considered by a full committee, she was accepted, six years after her first application.

The years that Yale Law held MacKinnon at bay, and while she began work toward her doctorate in political science, were intellectually dynamic. In the early 1970s, New Haven, much as any university city, was a place of intellectual ferment. For MacKinnon, the shift from Smith to Yale involved a shift from listening to acting. She arrived at Yale not long before the New Haven trial of Bobby Seale, national chairman of the Black Panther Party, for the alleged murder of another Panther suspected of being a police informer—a trial that led Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, to express skepticism whether a black revolutionary could get a fair trial in America. Politics became a question not only of what you thought but also of what you were going to do.

To consider what actions to take, MacKinnon and her friends in the political science cohort met once a week for dinner. They discussed supporting the Panthers, unionizing Yale workers, advancing class struggle. In early 1970, a male student gave MacKinnon an issue of Rat, a radical New York newspaper. It was created entirely by women—including Robin Morgan, who was then working on her anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful—who had taken over the newspaper after its usual male editors produced their own special issue, on sex and porn. To MacKinnon, the liberated Rat was the “first feminist anything I ever saw.” Also among MacKinnon’s friends, mimeographed copies began to circulate from an unknown writer’s incomplete book: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.

From this fusion of politics and feminism, MacKinnon was beginning a long graduate project that would become her equivalent of the quilt that her grandmother called “life’s work.” She would use Marxism and feminism to critique each other—and central to her critique would become Marxism’s failure to take into account the inequality of the sexes. It would eventually become both her 1987 doctoral dissertation for Yale and her 1989 book for Harvard University Press, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.