Category: Scholarship

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Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (1998)

Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (1998)

“After her astonishing testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings, Anita Hill ceased to be a private citizen and became a public figure at the white-hot center of an intense national debate on how men and women relate to each other in the workplace. That debate led to ground-breaking court decisions and major shifts in corporate policies that have had a profound effect on our lives–and on Anita Hill’s life. Now, with remarkable insight and total candor, Anita Hill reflects on events before, during, and after the hearings, offering for the first time a complete account that sheds startling new light on this watershed event.

Only after reading her moving recollection of her childhood on her family’s Oklahoma farm can we fully appreciate the values that enabled her to withstand the harsh scrutiny she endured during the hearings and for years afterward. Only after reading her detailed narrative of the Senate Judiciary proceedings do we reach a new understanding of how Washington–and the media–rush to judgment. And only after discovering the personal toll of this wrenching ordeal, and how Hill copes, do we gain new respect for this extraordinary woman.

Here is a vitally important work that allows us to understand why Anita Hill did what she did, and thereby brings resolution to one of the most controversial episodes in our nation’s history.”

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The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment (Cambridge University Press)

The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment examines how a diverse grassroots social movement created public policy on sexual harassment in the 1970s and 1980s. The collaboration of women from varying racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds strengthened the movement by representing the perspectives and activism of a broad range of women. Based on interviews and voluminous original research, this book is the first to show how the movement against sexual harassment fundamentally changed American life in ways that continue to advance women’s opportunities today.

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Lauren Stiller Rikleen, The Shield of Silence: How Power Perpetuates a Culture of Harassment and Bullying in the Workplace

The Shield of Silence: How Power Perpetuates a Culture of Harassment and Bullying in the Workplace, By Lauren Stiller Rikleen

The Shield of Silence: How Power Perpetuates a Culture of Harassment and Bullying in the Workplace looks at the culture of the workplace and its impact on women and other groups who bear the impact of sexual harassment, bullying, lewd and inappropriate remarks, and other behaviors that can negatively impact the experiences of people each day.

 

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Sexual Harassment in the Airline Industry: Podcast

Sexism Takes Flight, Sexting History

In the 1960s, the airline industry ramped up its sexualization of stewardesses in order to increase revenues. Decades before the #MeToo movement, flight attendants navigated a workplace in which their employers required them to stay thin, remain unmarried, and squeeze into revealing clothing every day. In the early 1970s, flight attendants organized one of the first campaigns against workplace sexual harassment, assault, and sexual discrimination.

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A History of the Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment

Carrie N. Baker, The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment examines how a diverse grassroots social movement created public policy on sexual harassment in the 1970s and 1980s. The collaboration of women from varying racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds strengthened the movement by representing the perspectives and activism of a broad range of women. Based on interviews and voluminous original research, this book is the first to show how the movement against sexual harassment fundamentally changed American life in ways that continue to advance women’s opportunities today.

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Constance Backhouse on the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion

Backhouse, Constance, Sexual Harassment: A Feminist Phrase that Transformed the Workplace (2012). Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 24:2 (2012) 275-300. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2268095

This article is a first-person memoir from a co-author of the first Canadian book on sexual harassment. It attempts to recount, from one individual’s admittedly partial memory, some of the events that surrounded the early feminist efforts to eradicate sexual harassment in the workplace. It tracks the events that culminated in the publication of Constance Backhouse and Leah Cohen’s The Secret Oppression: Sexual Harassment of Working Women (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978) and the public furor that greeted the book’s arrival. It focuses on the wider social, political, economic, and cultural context surrounding the debate over sexual harassment and tries to analyze to what extent concrete improvements arrived upon the heels of the
demands for change.