In recent weeks, the Daily Egyptian has published several articles about SIUC's sexual harassment policy which, taken together, have implicitly put forth a portrait of sexual harassment policy that is historically uninformed. Within this portrait, sexual harassment policy becomes a crude weapon recklessly wielded by vindictive administrators against the alleged harasser, who emerges as a workplace victim par excellence.
Meanwhile, completely missing from the portrait is the very person that sexual harassment policies were originally designed to protect - the worker who believes that he or she has been subjected to inappropriate sexual attention or advances and seeks protection.
Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was this worker - often young and female - who bravely demanded the development of sexual harassment policies. Spurred on by the larger struggle for workplace rights spearheaded by the black freedom and feminist movements of the era, women workers began to address a problem they had long assumed would be impossible to overcome: namely, unwarranted sexual attention from co-workers and bosses. Historically, this attention had taken multiple forms, ranging from whistling to invasive touching, from jeers to provocative comments, from stalking to sexual assault. Half a century ago, a woman who encountered these kinds of actions at the workplace was completely powerless. If she dared to complain, she could be fired on a whim.
But by the early 1970s, women were demanding change. Activists organized speak-outs on sexual harassment, workers began testifying to the abuses endured on the job, and groups like the National Organization of Women placed sexual harassment at the top of their agendas. Meanwhile, African-American and blue-collar working women pursued some of the first sexual litigation cases; judges in those cases sometimes accused plaintiffs of being "overly sensitive" and of misinterpreting innocent flattery. But by 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission had identified sexual harassment as a form of illegal job discrimination, and in 1985, the Supreme Court concluded that it violated women's civil rights. The transformation was rapid and dramatic.
As historian Nancy MacLean describes it, "Within a decade, activists had created potent remedies for what had long seemed a blight of nature."
How is this history relevant to the current controversies surrounding SIUC's sexual harassment policy?
Does this history mean that no one has ever been falsely accused of sexual harassment? Of course not.
Does it mean that existing sexual harassment policies cannot be refined and improved? No.
But this history does require that we recognize the evolution of sexual harassment policy for what it was - a significant chapter in the modern history of the American labor movement, a direct consequence of women's economic and political empowerment, and part of a larger revolution in American jurisprudence that ultimately created a safer, more humane environment for all workers. Recent news stories have not only suppressed this history but distorted it by defining sexual harassment policy first and foremost as a weapon of administrators. Let's hope that in the months ahead we can do better by placing this history at the center of any demand for policy reform.
Zaretsky is an associate professor of history.
