The Long History of Workplace Sexual Harassment
Sexual coercion in the workplace has long been a primary driver of gender inequities.
Anita Hill speaking at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ February.Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia
In the wake of the #MeToo uprising, I picked up a small and dusty mass-market paperback from my bookshelves. Published forty years ago, Lin Farley’s Sexual Shakedown documented women’s pervasive experiences of sexual intimidation and outright abuse on the job. Crucially, she insisted that until we understand the systemic role that verbal and physical sexual assault have played in the workforce, we will not solve the prevailing problems of women’s employment, including unequal pay, lack of promotion opportunities, unjust firing, and continuing gender segregation in the workforce.
Farley’s book is out of print, but no less relevant than it was forty years ago. It reminds us that sexual harassment (a phrase that Farley herself coined) is at the core of gendered discrimination in the labor force — a prime mechanism for maintaining and perpetuating women’s disadvantaged position and a prime driver of persistent gender inequalities. Today, as massive numbers of women call attention to the presence and power of sexual harassment, it is worth recalling the long history of this form of constraint.
A Male Domain
The workplace has long been imagined as a male domain, a place where men demonstrated their masculinity through skill and proved their ability to support and sustain families. To defend their turf and limit competition, male workers adopted strategies of exclusion. In the course of industrialization, white workers and employers sought to marginalize outsiders — the formerly enslaved, immigrants, people of color, women — denying them training and consigning them to the poorest paying and most difficult jobs. Women remain among the longest lasting of the excluded.
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