Institutional Courage Before We Had the Term Sexual Harassment

by Estelle Freedman, Robinson Professor in U.S. History, Emerit, Stanford University

A note from Courage: Estelle B. Freedman, Robinson Professor in U.S. History, Emerit, Stanford University, is one of our Research Advisors. We asked Professor Freedman to tell us about her current research on women’s history and sexuality and the lessons it provides about institutional betrayal and courage.

My current research explores oral histories to understand how women in the twentieth century U.S. recalled past sexual assault and harassment. I find particularly intriguing the narratives of sexual harassment that occurred before labor and feminist activists coined that term in the 1970s.

In this pre-naming period, betrayal stories abound: a 1930s Black college graduate’s first job interview with a respected clergyman included a sexual proposition; World War II factory workers faced unwanted sexual touching and propositions on the job; male law school faculty regularly called on the few female students in their classes only when discussing rape cases. A recurrent lament about harassment, “Who cared?,” epitomized the era.

Individual courage and ingenuity remained the overwhelming forms of resistance. Women dodged and deflected harassers or left intolerable jobs if they could. Many took pride in their ability to keep men at bay, while others harbored deep resentments that surfaced decades later in their interviews.

A few women, however, vividly recalled exceptional moments. Half a century after World War II a white shipyard worker described how a woman supervisor had “read the riot act” to stop draftsmen from making suggestive remarks to young female colleagues. Soon after the war, a Japanese American woman became the first female engineering student admitted to Brown University. Seventy years later she reflected that the school had been “ahead of its time” by assigning a male faculty mentor who would “make sure that no hanky panky” took place when she enrolled.  

Hint of change occurred during the mid-1960s. An African American airline reservations worker recalled that she resisted a supervisor’s unwanted touching, then learned that it was a prerequisite for getting a desirable shift. After she complained, the company demoted him. As the interviewer interjected, “That's pretty good for that time period.” She agreed, “For that time” -- that is, when neither law nor culture had identified sexual harassment as a form of workplace discrimination.

In the 1970s, when equal rights laws enabled formal complaints and class action suits, more women confronted co-workers and supervisors about sexual harassment. As one interviewee explained, “by this time I could spell . . . sexual harassment and I knew what it looked like.” In oral histories, however, women rarely commented on courageous interventions by employers or schools.

Despite the 1986 Supreme Court ruling that sexual harassment constituted a form of workplace discrimination, speaking out about unwanted advances remained risky. The interviews reveal that disbelief and retaliation continued to discourage reporting, before and after the dramatic public naming of sexual harassment by Anita Hill in 1991.

While only occasional glimpses of institutional courage appear in this historical record, I continue to look closely for these exceptions. The narratives  highlight the continued importance of individual interventions and personal resistance, as well as the deep legacy of institutional self-protection that has long perpetuated gender and racial inequality.