Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment

By Linda Hirshman

The first history—incisive, witty, fascinating—of the fight against sexual harassment, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Sisters in Law

Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first tales of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal—when liberal women largely forgave Clinton, giving men a free pass for two decades. Many liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus.

 And yet, legal, political, and cultural efforts, often spearheaded by women of color, were quietly paving the way for the takedown of abusers and harassers. Reckoning delivers the stirring tale of a movement catching fire as pioneering women in the media exposed the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, women flooded the political landscape, and the walls of male privilege finally began to crack. This is revelatory, essential social history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781328566751

Linda Hirshman

LINDA HIRSHMAN is the author of Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment, and of the New York Times best-selling Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2020

Copyright © 2019 by Linda Hirshman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hirshman, Linda R., author.

Title: Reckoning : the epic battle against sexual abuse and harassment /Linda Hirshman.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051341 (print) | LCCN 2018060829 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566751 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566447 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358305613 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Sexual harassment of women—United States—History—20th century. | Sexual harassment of women—United States—History—21st century. | Sex crimes—United States—History—20th century. | Sex crimes—United States—History—21st century. | Sexual harassment of women—Law and legislation—United States. | Trials (Sex crimes)—United States.

Classification: LCC HQ1237.5.U6 (ebook) | LCC HQ1237.5.U6 H57 2019 (print) | DDC 305.420973—DC23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051341

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph © Classen Rafael / EyeEm / Getty

Author photograph © Nina Subin

v2.0220

This book is dedicated to a virtuous circle of women who are at once activists, writers, lawyers, and teachers: Catharine A. MacKinnon, who taught my dear departed Jane E. Larson, and Jane, who taught Michele L. Dauber, who came full circle back to MacKinnon, as do we all.

Preface

Tanya Harrell was just doing her job at a New Orleans McDonald’s in 2017 when a guy she worked with shoved her into the bathroom, locked the door, and tried to rape her. The only thing the twenty-year-old could do was cry and cry—until he heard the manager calling where were we, she says, and he finally let me go.¹

Harrell wasn’t going to get any help, she knew, because the last time she’d complained that a coworker had harassed her, her shift manager at McDonald’s suggested the touching was consensual. Sure enough, when she told the new manager about the attempted rape, the boss treated her story like it was nothing. Harrell, who had left high school so she could work to pay for the medicine her grandmother needed, could not leave her low-wage job.

One year later, on May 22, 2018, Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, an initiative founded by prominent women in the entertainment industry, announced that it would be paying for Tanya Harrell—and a dozen other low-wage workers around the country—to sue McDonald’s and its franchisees for harassment. After all, sexual harassment had been recognized as a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for more than thirty years.

What a difference a year makes.

In some respects the movement against sexual harassment, now known as #MeToo, has felt like a tsunami, a sudden eruption no one could have anticipated. In this version, the waters rose on October 2017, seven months before Tanya Harrell’s moment of empowerment, when the New York Times announced that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades.² Mere days after the Times story appeared, a tweet by the actress Alyssa Milano gave new life to a slogan that had originated in 2006 with an established black activist, Tarana Burke.³ If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote Me Too as a reply, Milano thought, people might get a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Overnight, her tweet received fifty-five thousand responses, and #MeToo was the number one trending hashtag on Twitter; in the days and weeks that followed, the hashtag caught fire globally. By the year anniversary, the tag had appeared in almost fourteen million public tweets.⁴ Within that year, more than two hundred powerful men in entertainment, media, politics, education, tech, and more had been brought down by the charges.⁵

But no social movement arises in an instant. All successful social movements rest on a long history of organization and activism. The racial civil rights movement did not start with Rosa Parks being too tired to stand up on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. At the time Parks refused to give up her seat, in December 1955, she was already the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, which had been organizing against segregation for years. The same week in June 1969 that the first person threw the first rock at the police outside the Greenwich Village gay bar Stonewall, gay members of the Students for a Democratic Society were already planning an organizing meeting to bring what they had learned from their activism in the civil rights and antiwar movements to New York’s simmering gay community.⁶ Similarly, the women’s movement against sexual abuse and harassment did not spring up overnight in response to a scoop or a tweet.

In Reckoning, I tell the story of women’s fifty-year battle against sexual abuse and harassment. From the schoolyard to the steelyard, using the law and an evolving culture, against setbacks and self-inflicted wounds, against enemies and frenemies, by 2017 the movement finally gathered enough power to stand up and shout Me Too. Or, more importantly, Time’s Up.

The battle against sexual harassment and abuse was unique. Women are a group that makes up the majority of the US population, a majority neither geographically marginalized, as were African Americans, into slave states and ghettos, nor concentrated, as were gays and lesbians, in specific neighborhoods, but integrated by ineluctable law of biology into every human institution. They are lovers of men, wives of husbands, and, whatever their sexual orientation, mothers, sisters, daughters, employees, and employers of men. Because women are a majority, they are intersected by every social dividing line.

The position of women—numerous, integrated—arguably makes their organization more fearsome and threatening to a predominantly male-dominated culture than any other movement. At the same time, it makes the pressure to ally with that male culture strong. From the beginning, as the first plaintiffs in the 1970s, to the election of 2018, women of color were the feminist vanguard. But a women’s alliance is hard to pull off when white women in particular tend to vote with their more conservative husbands,⁷ women sometimes instinctively defend their sons against claims of bad behavior,⁸ and wives and lovers may value meeting traditional expectations of their roles vis-à-vis men above their political power.

This movement, both epic and sui generis, struggled for most of its history to apply the three basic rules for achieving successful social change in the American context: (1) claim the moral high ground, (2) hold regular meetings, and (3) prioritize your own interests. Women’s situation made it challenging for them to make use of these three reliable techniques. Certainly they had a moral argument—the morality of equality. But they were invoking morality in a realm—sex—where moral talk is often regarded as puritanical and self-defeating. As for holding meetings, women were long reluctant to speak out, much less organize, against damaging and infringing, often covert, behavior by men, in a culture in which women themselves were likely to be blamed, demeaned, shamed, shunned, and fired for exposing that behavior. And finally, because women cross all other possible social divisions, their interests were always stretched in all directions—race, class, religion, region, sexual orientation. The feminist movement is not so much an intersection as a six-way roundabout.

Nevertheless, not only have women made, from this crooked timber, a movement, they have made a movement that confronts the critical place where oppressed and oppressors meet: in the relationship of sex. Resisting abuse and harassment in sex is uniquely problematic for a movement because sex is a source not only of danger and injury but of pleasure and fulfillment. Unlike the unambiguous oppression of whipping, shackling, criminal prohibition, forced psychotherapies, unequal pay, school segregation, and the like, sexual relations can be a good thing, and as a good thing, sex motivates people to defend access to it. It would be surprising to hear of African Americans who supported separate and unequal schools during the civil rights movement. But the women’s movement includes more than one episode where women calling themselves feminists have gone to bat for powerful men over access to sex. Claiming the moral high ground when the subject is sex turns out to be harder than any other similar quest. And yet, it happened.

A decade after Betty Friedan’s 1963 manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, gave a critical push to modern feminism (called the second wave, since the first wave of suffrage had ebbed), feminist law professor, activist, and scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon in the 1970s created the legal theory that sexual harassment of working women violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁹

The mostly white intellectuals who started the movement found invaluable allies on the new front in black women, who had long been working in the public realm. Almost all the early plaintiffs challenging sexual harassment at work were African American. In 1986 Mechelle Vinson took her case all the way to the Supreme Court. And won.

Resistance to sexual abuse and harassment caught men by surprise. Although most African American women had never had the luxury of being stay-at-home moms, the rebirth of feminism in the 1960s had brought an unprecedented number of white women into the workplace. These new female workers were met with a massive campaign of harassment, which black women had always experienced. When newly empowered women started resisting the harassment as a violation of their civil rights, men weren’t prepared: wasn’t sex a private and personal matter, immune from the judgment of the market or the law? Women’s activism triggered male (and female) resistance of massive scope. Male presidents of the United States, titans of industry, prize-winning artists, media moguls, and coworkers at McDonald’s—all engaged in harassment and abuse and fiercely defended their rights when met with even the slightest pushback from the women in their worlds.

Indeed, as activists struggled to bring women’s equality to reality, they encountered resistance on every front. Married women, especially married white women, did not want to trade the security of their marital bargain with high-earning husbands for some future equality in a job they might never want or need. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly mobilized a triumvirate of conservative Protestant evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews to fight the ratification of the cherished feminist goal of an Equal Rights Amendment, and she stopped it in its tracks. Civil Rights–era liberals began to retire or were forced off the Supreme Court, and their seats taken by Republican-appointed conservative justices.

The conservative victories under the antifeminist Schlafly showed that when the movement turned to retail politics rather than elite judiciaries to achieve its goals, the going got very rough. Yet ultimately the battle would have to be fought on that difficult terrain.

Uniquely, in the fight for sexual equality, the emerging conservative movement was not feminism’s primary foe. In moving toward legal—and cultural—equality in the highly contested realm of human sexuality, feminists often encountered the most effective resistance from those claiming to be their allies: other liberals. In 1998 Equal Rights Amendment booster and feminist ally Bill Clinton, as president of the United States, started a sexual relationship with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem took to the opinion pages that year to proclaim the feminist movement’s support for Clinton.

The media, including the entertainment industry, liberal on other subjects, were at the same time enjoying an uninterrupted heyday as a 24/7 casting couch. This meant that the same men who expected ambitious and idolizing young women to service them sexually were the ones in charge of messaging regarding social change, or the lack thereof. Newsweek told women trying to pursue careers that they were as likely to be killed by a terrorist as find a husband after forty. Time proclaimed the Death of Feminism.¹⁰ When colleges tried to tighten the rules about sexual assault on campus, liberals teaching criminal law avidly resisted the effort to shift the balance between victim and accused. Sometimes it seemed no one on either side of the political divide cared about women’s sexual treatment. Beginning in the 1970s, conservatives mobilized against the new movement for women’s rights in general, and liberals didn’t recognize rights for women in sex. By 1991, feminism, on the rise since 1963, faced a terrible backlash from all sides.

A new generation of women, scarred by relentless media-driven attacks, began to look for a way out of the pitched battles they had seen their mothers wage and, too often, lose. Here again, the ambiguous relationship between heterosexual women and men was Kryptonite to the movement. This time, it wasn’t conservative wives worried about the changes in alimony rules, should their breadwinners wander. The sexual revolution had taken much of the steam out of that position. This time, the backlash was internalized in the form of feminists’ daughters not wanting to be cast as man-hating prudes by sexy liberal male writers and lawyers, potential mates after all. These third wave feminists would be the so-called lipstick feminists. High heels and you choose your choice. At the extreme, they would write books about how college girls should stop complaining about being raped in their dorms.¹¹ The pressures for conformity to a male heterosexual norm seemed nearly irresistible.

But by the oughts the waters were rising: a reenergized, millennial feminist movement was developing. Young women read MacKinnon in their women’s studies classes. They groused online. The aging cohort of female senators elected in the 1992 Year of the Woman—a result of Clarence Thomas being confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court in spite of Anita Hill’s testimony on his workplace sexual harassment—was followed by a trickle of ever younger women, like New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and California’s Kamala Harris. Emerging from websites like Angry Black Bitch and Jezebel, a stream of female and feminist journalists penetrated the legacy media. One of them, a brave newbie, posted a spreadsheet online called Shitty Media Men, which collected allegations of sexual misconduct; it immediately went viral.¹² And there was a watershed reckoning in the summer of 2016, when conservative Fox News host Gretchen Carlson sued the bullying, powerful head of the network, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment and brought him down.

Undeterred by the reality of sexually misbehaving GOP House Speakers in the 1990s (Gingrich, adultery; Livingston, adultery; Hastert, pedophilia),¹³ conservatives had long resisted women’s claims to sexual equality on the grounds that virtue rested in the patriarchal home. When Republicans nominated and elected Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, however, a critical shift began. The release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016 revealed the thrice-married Trump admitting to a long practice of abusing women: Grab ’em by the pussy.¹⁴ Rallying behind him, conservatives extended their bedrock support of oppressing women in the traditional religious marital order to embrace openly anything that kept women down, including acts of harassment and abuse in the public world for which they had previously vilified Democrats. A realignment was now fully on the table.

Like it or not, Bill Clinton’s spouse did not present a clean choice where sexual misconduct was concerned. Many committed liberals resisted her candidacy by rallying around the white male insurgent Bernie Sanders. According to some exit polls, 52 percent of all white women voted for the abusive Trump. Even when fully empowered, the emerging movement against sexual abuse was never going to reach takeoff until the feminists recruited a critical minority of their white sisters and finally took on their liberal allies to create a united front, on the left.

The next development came from investigative journalists. In October 2017 two reporters published the story of big-time Democratic donor and Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein abusing women in private while supporting women’s rights in public. Women and their allies in journalism immediately began calling liberal men to account: along with Weinstein were MSNBC’s Mark Halperin, coauthor of Game Change; Hamilton Fish, publisher of the liberal magazine the New Republic; NBC’s Today host and political moderator Matt Lauer. These were the men who had covered the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, the first female candidate for president. How, women began to ask, can we trust what we learned from them?

The nascent alliance between feminists and liberals faced a crucial test when first one, and then a total of eight, women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment against Minnesota senator Al Franken, one of the few genuinely effective Democrats in the Senate. Democratic senators, led by the now meaningful number of women in their midst, organized Franken’s resignation. Women were starting to show their teeth. Not all the old-school liberal allies liked the new order, but dismissing Franken gave the Democrats the sexual moral high ground against the party on the other side.

Now sorted out, the two camps met on the field of battle in July 2018, when the libertine conservative president Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the crucial swing seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Six weeks later, a psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of committing sexual assault when they were both teens. A credible second accusation from Kavanaugh’s years at Yale surfaced. The Republican-dominated Senate called both parties to a televised version of she said/he said. After the courteous, deferential, and soft-spoken Ford presented her testimony, Judge Kavanaugh performed a full-on aria of male rage. How dare they question him about his sexual behavior? President Trump delivered a mocking attack on Dr. Ford at a rally. Kavanaugh was confirmed with the support of every single Republican in the Senate. (Lisa Murkowski, one of five female Republican senators, voted present rather than yes or no.) As fit the pattern since the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and far earlier, crucial support for Kavanaugh’s nomination came, this time in the form of a swing vote, from a married conservative white female (Republican senator Susan Collins) allying with the white men in her party.

All eyes turned to the midterm elections, a story that appears in the final chapter of Reckoning. Because of its constitutional structure, the United States Senate does not represent the majority of US citizens; each state, whatever its population, gets two senators. But the elections to the House of Representatives are the closest thing Americans have to a referendum on where American voters stand. Second-wave feminism, the brainchild of a Smith-educated Jewish intellectual from Westchester County, had never won a referendum. Has more than a half century of epic battle finally changed the playing field?

No less an authority than the avatar of second-wave feminism, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, prophesied that this time the movement would prevail. When I see women appearing every place in numbers, I’m less worried about a backlash than I might have been twenty years ago.¹⁵ After fifty years of building and one year of volcanic protest, the supporters of the movement against sexual abuse and harassment were too numerous to push back. On November 26, 2018, the New York Times summed up the results of the great referendum of 2018: ‘Kavanaugh’s Revenge’ Fell Short Against the Democrats in the Midterms. Nationally, the Times reported, exit polls showed that more voters opposed Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination than supported it, and that women were far more likely than men to be against his confirmation.¹⁶ Fifty-nine percent of women voters in 2018 backed the Democrats.¹⁷ The best polls even showed white women breaking the Democrats’ way.¹⁸

The movement we call #MeToo has, to a greater or lesser extent, aligned at last with the three basic rules for successful social change. First, women are claiming the moral high ground: massive numbers of women are now unabashedly sharing stories of abuse and naming harassing conduct as wrong. Second, the internet and the invention of hashtags have gone a long way in helping women organize and achieve solidarity. And many #MeToo institutions, like the Time’s Up organization in Hollywood, are holding organizational meetings in real life. Finally, women—so far especially Democratic women—are no longer maintaining alliances with male politicians whose public commitment to feminism is shown to conflict with their private behavior. But with women a majority scattered among men everywhere, the movement must continue to claim some minimum of support from white women to win elections. In the aftermath of the triumphal midterms, the question is, was 2018 a rogue event or will the fifty-year battle against sexual abuse and harassment lead inevitably to a reckoning, now?

Tanya Harrell has gone back to school. She is strengthened, she says, by knowing about all the other women who went through what she did. And that so many of them have her back.

1

Naming It, Claiming It

1969–80

Chappaquiddick

She died slowly, gasping for the last pocket of air in the automobile sinking into the waters off Chappaquiddick Island. Mary Jo Kopechne, veteran of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, twenty-eight years old and devoted to the Kennedy family, had left her purse behind and simply climbed into the car with Senator Ted Kennedy. Now she was drowning in tidal Poucha Pond, and he was nowhere to be seen.

Ten hours after the accident, dry and fully dressed, Kennedy walked into the police station in nearby Edgartown, Massachusetts. Kennedy, the only surviving brother in the legendary political clan, after Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1968 and President Jack Kennedy assassinated in 1963, was widely rumored as a contender for his party’s nomination in the 1972 presidential election. He told the police chief that he had been driving the car when it went off the bridge. Somehow, Kennedy’s story goes, after he drove into the pond, he got out of the sinking car and surfaced above the rushing water.

He was next seen at the nearby rental cottage where his group of five married men and six women had been partying. After emerging from the pond, he said, he walked back to the party to get his pals there to help. Along the way, he passed several houses, indicating the presence of people who could have helped. But he did not stop.

It was July 1969. Years later, the screenwriters of a documentary about the incident have Kennedy say, I’m never going to be President.¹ In his end-of-life memoir, he acknowledged that reality.²

But ten years later, Ted Kennedy thought he had finally been cleansed of Chappaquiddick. After he’d pled guilty to leaving the scene, an inquest had concluded with no new charges. Twice reelected by his adoring Massachusetts constituents, surrounded by supportive Senate colleagues, Kennedy decided that the 1980 election was now or never: the Democrat in the White House, Jimmy Carter, was at an unprecedented low approval rating. Polls showed Kennedy could take him in a primary and likely beat Republican front-runner Ronald Reagan in the general. Carter’s self-righteous demeanor in the face of inflation and a stagnating economy had rendered him virtually unelectable against the Republicans. Once again, a Kennedy would save the party. Chappaquiddick? The tenth anniversary passed in July of 1979 with nary a murmur.

So television anchorman Roger Mudd seemingly caught the candidate by surprise with his question in the first interview of the 1979 campaign.³ The judge who presided over the hearing said he believed you lied about Chappaquiddick, Mudd began. Will anyone ever fully believe your explanation? Kennedy responded with a long string of utterly incoherent verbiage: The problem is, from that night, I, I found the conduct, the behavior almost beyond belief myself. I mean that’s why it’s been, but I think that’s the way it was, he rambled. But that happens to be the way it was, he finally concluded. And then, interview over, he waited. After all, the media had blithely ignored Kennedy’s brother, the martyred President John F. Kennedy, sneaking himself and his various bedmates in and out of the White House, and his other brother, the martyred presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, stirring the sex pots with Marilyn Monroe before she died in scandalous circumstances, in that case a notorious suicide.

Not this time.⁴ From the moment Ted Kennedy set foot in the state of Iowa in 1979, it was clear that Iowa women—schoolteachers, plant workers—had not forgotten Chappaquiddick. Had voters been so inclined, reporters, from Tom Wicker of the New York Times to Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News, were ready to remind them of Kennedy’s inadequate repentance. How about Bless me, Father, for I have sinned? Breslin suggested, for starters. Unlike Jimmy Carter, liberal Ted Kennedy was publicly feminist. He supported Medicaid payments for abortions and the feminists’ dream, a constitutional Equal Rights Amendment, still awaiting ratification by a few more states. But in the private world, there were no women in any serious positions on his staff.⁵ His reputation as a known womanizer gave the head of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Iris Mitgang, reason for pause,⁶ and female political reporter Suzannah Lessard the creeps.⁷ Kennedy lost Iowa 59 percent to 31 percent; a few months later support for his candidacy collapsed in the Catholic precincts of Chicago. With all the pausing and the remembering, the Chappaquiddick survivor and philandering women’s-policy ally Ted Kennedy lost the primary to the upright Jimmy Carter. You might call it a #MeToo moment.

Coda

But it was a #MeToo moment with a big cost to women’s other interests. In November the sexually virtuous Carter lost in a landslide to conservative Republican Ronald Reagan. In its nominating convention, the Republican Party had officially repudiated abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. In Reagan’s reelection four years later, pollsters noticed the first signs of an electoral gender gap. Women were migrating to the Democrats and men to the Republicans. Had he been the nominee in 1984, Teddy might have beaten Reagan. Women seemed stuck between womanizing Democrats and antiwoman Republicans, and in political precincts, voters took note.

Naming It: Sexual Harassment

After Chappaquiddick, the Washington media began to take off their well-worn kid gloves where sexually misbehaving politicians were concerned. Kennedy’s marriage, which had apparently been unraveling for years, suddenly became fair game. Washingtonian Magazine cited the senator’s roving eye in a 1972 article entitled Washington’s Biggest Male Chauvinist Pigs.⁸ The Washington Post’s Watergate scoop that brought down President Nixon transformed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s journalism colleagues into lean and hungry men. The journalists were hardly rabid advocates of women’s equality. In the era of family values, they were mostly in it for the scandal. But the groundwork was laid. In the mid-1970s, revelations about Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Wayne Hays keeping his mistress on the payroll, and the even more powerful Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills cavorting with a well-known DC stripper, led to ejection of the two male leaders from the corridors of power. The errant politicos might be forgiven for some bewilderment over their harsh treatment after the halcyon years of untouchable Kennedy womanizers, but things were about to get a lot worse.

In 1972 Cornell University physics professor Boyce McDaniel was spending his days visiting his newly promoted administrative assistant Carmita Wood. The amorous physicist was about to set off a sustained chain reaction:⁹ Wood was not glad to see him. He had been pestering her for years while she was a lowly clerical worker. But she had always been able to stay out of range. Now, in her new, better job as his assistant, he had her in his sights. He’d pin her against a desk or the wall, scrutinize her, and simulate masturbation in front of her with his hands in his pants pockets. Complaints to her supervisor brought her no relief. Finally, when her tormentor used the office Christmas party to pull her into a dance and put his hands under her sweater, she quit. When she applied for unemployment compensation in 1974, the New York State Unemployment Commission turned her down. Not wanting to work with Boyce McDaniel was her personal decision, the commission said.

Far above Cayuga’s waters at the same moment, a young feminist, Lin Farley, was preparing to teach a field-study course at Cornell called Women and Work. Since there was no published material on the topic, she did what any self-respecting feminist would do in the mid-1970s: she convened a consciousness-raising group. In these sessions women shared their stories of something she had never seen described or reported. Every one of the women in her group had quit or been fired at least once because some man had targeted her for sex. As Farley put it, the women quit their jobs because they had been made too uncomfortable by men. Farley and two colleagues, Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigné, mobilized the Women’s Section of the Human Affairs Program at Cornell to study, among other things, women and work. Hearing about the new academic program, Carmita Wood went to the Women’s Section for help. Farley and her associates got her a lawyer.

The feminist activists distributed a questionnaire on sexual harassment to women attending a speak-out on the subject, and to women members of the Civil Service Employees Association in Binghamton, New York. They soon had their answer: over 70 percent of the 155 respondents reported some kind of experience with sexual mistreatment.¹⁰ The group brainstormed about what to call it. What term applied to behavior ranging from repeated ogling to unwanted touching to forced sexual relations? They gave it a name:¹¹ sexual harassment. In social change, naming is almost always a watershed. The abolitionists called slavery man stealing, with all its implications of biblical sinfulness. More recently, concepts like white privilege and unconscious bias have enabled people to see how certain normalized behaviors and thought patterns fit into harmful race and gender categories.

In 1975 Lin Farley went to New York City to testify about the problem before the city’s Commission on Human Rights.¹² She attracted the attention of Enid Nemy, a longtime reporter at the New York Times, whose story appeared under the headline Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work. Being about women, the article appeared in the women’s pages, at this point Family/Living at the Gray Lady. Still, Nemy’s reporting was impeccable. The article, describing the issue as shrouded in silence because its occurrence is seen as both humiliating and trivial and including harrowing stories of relentless harassment and desperate employees, is one of those iconic Times pieces that, looking back, sounded the alarm early.¹³ Although the women didn’t identify their abusers by name, as in today’s movement, many of the women in the Cornell group identified themselves and described their abuse. A resourceful journalist could easily have outed the offenders. Nemy was hardly some radical feminist. She neither had nor wanted any part in the pending sex discrimination lawsuit the female Times reporters had filed against the paper the year before, and claims "she was never discriminated against at the Times.¹⁴ On the subject of the story’s placement in the Family/Living section, Nemy said, We were able to give more attention to feminism than if the stories had had to compete in the general stream of the newspaper."¹⁵ The Cornell area women’s movement was now a matter of record.

Now that they had named it, Lin Farley began writing a book, Sexual Shakedown, cataloging the offenses in detail. And they were legion: staring, requests for intimacy and dates, demands for intercourse, rape. Because women are in such a vulnerable place in the workforce, they experience disproportionately high turnover, low wages, and job segregation, which makes them more economically insecure than men. Since they are statistically poorer, they are subject to domestic inequality. Within three years of the DC Police Department opening its doors to women, Farley reports, women were being coerced into having sexual intercourse in exchange for better assignments. Want ads for office work explicitly sought an attractive girl, waitresses were asked to lie down and do it, female secretaries became rapidly less employable as they aged.¹⁶ In the last chapter of Farley’s book, The Casting Couch, Herb Belkin, then president of ABC Records, opined that sexual practice in the entertainment industry was a great example of the free market. The availability of people with mutual interests means no one gets forced . . . a chick comes in with a guitar and may go down on the producer before, during or after.¹⁷ Or as #MeToo’s Alyssa Milano put it thirty years later, You can look at a lot of aspects of the underrepresented people in that industry being sex workers.¹⁸

Farley’s solutions sound horribly familiar forty years later: integrate the workforce, enforce the rape laws, make harassment a violation of the Civil Rights Act, which already prohibited sex discrimination in employment. By the time of the book’s publication, a handful of women, almost all of them black, had started making legal claims for harassment under the Civil Rights Act. Women will be 40 percent