Abstract
Suggesting that the #MeToo movement echoes feminist mobilization in the 1970s to conceptualize sexploitation, sex abuse, sexual coercion, sexual extortion, sexual intimidation, and sexual harassment as gender-based injustices, Hawkesworth explores the difficulty of moving from identification of harms felt in the flesh and in the psyche to institutional practices designed to eradicate those harms. Through a case study of feminist efforts to create and implement a sexual harassment policy at one university in the United States, Hawkesworth examines feminist efforts to theorize and address political dimensions of private relations unrecognized by political theories or political science. She traces how sustained opposition to feminist efforts to make good on the promise of equal opportunity affords insights into the operations of gender power and contributes to a theory of gendered institutions. Deployed as a mode of theoretical analysis, gender reveals the depth of the challenge that feminist activism poses to accredited understandings of individual liberty, equality of opportunity, equal treatment, and the fiduciary responsibilities of universities. It also helps explain entrenched resistance to feminist social change efforts and cautions against naïve optimism about the transformative prospects of the #MeToo movement.
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Notes
- 1.
Of the five EEOC commissioners initially appointed in 1965, only one, Aileen Hernandez, was a woman. Although Title VII included a prohibition of sex discrimination, Hernandez reported that other members of the commission as well as EEOC staff responded to sex discrimination complaints with boredom or virulent hostility. As a consequence, sex discrimination complaints received short shrift for years. Bernice Sandler’s work at the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) played a crucial role in pressing the government to take sex discrimination seriously. In 1970, working with feminist academics across the country, she compiled data to lodge a class action sex discrimination complaint against 250 universities and colleges in the United States (Sandler 1973). For a lively account of this bleak history, see Collins 2009.
- 2.
Ann Ferguson was the only woman teaching in the philosophy department during my studies. I had the good fortune to take her class in aesthetics during my senior year. Although Jean Elshtain joined the political science department in my final year, I did not have the opportunity to study with her.
- 3.
African American women were pioneers in sexual harassment litigation, filing a disproportionate number of early sexual harassment cases. For a discussion of their critical role, see Sasha Patterson, Chasing Justice, Challenging Power: Legal Consciousness and the Mobilization of Sexual Harassment Law. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008 and Baker 2008.
- 4.
In The Lecherous Professor, Dziech and Weiner (1984, 164) note that the American Council on Education held seminars on sexual harassment policy in 1979. At these seminars, the University of Louisville was one of three schools (University of Washington and Tulane University were the others) cited as having a “model sexual harassment policy.” Such national recognition is interesting since no one at the University of Louisville, including the President and the University Counsel, knew that such a policy existed in 1985.
- 5.
Operating with mistaken assumptions about stranger rape, university police and student life staff involved in judicial board hearings were routinely dismissing claims about date rape and rapes occurring in fraternity houses and parties organized by football and basketball teams. In the most egregious instance, an allegation of a gang rape was rejected because the four accused men insisted that “the sex was consensual” and only the woman victim claimed it had been nonconsensual. The judicial board dismissed all charges against the accused on the basis of “majority rule,” insisting that four testimonies had to overrule one.
- 6.
As a committee, we developed rape prevention workshops that we presented to all fraternities, sororities, and university athletic teams as well as student groups who requested them. Later we succeeded in incorporating these workshops in the university’s official student orientation program, reaching a far larger audience. We were provided no funding or release time for these activities.
- 7.
In a particularly egregious case where a faculty member had exposed himself to a graduate student in his office, the faculty member was relieved of his teaching duties, given a semester leave with pay, and then promoted to an administrative job at a higher salary. In an institution where paid sabbatical leave was a rare privilege and faculty salaries were low, such treatment seemed more a reward for sexual harassment than a punishment for patently offensive, unethical, and illegal conduct.
- 8.
The University Women’s Information Network was created in the early 1980s by the same group of campus feminists that formed the Rape Prevention Task Force and the Sexual Harassment Task Force. UWIN began holding open meetings of faculty and staff to discuss sex discrimination and sexual harassment on campus. After gathering evidence of systemic problems, UWIN sent letters to the President to inform him of pay inequities, unfair working conditions, acts of discrimination and sexual harassment, and the need for a childcare facility on campus. The letters always ended with a request that he provide remedies to these problems. When no action was forthcoming, UWIN also lobbied the one woman member of the Board of Trustees to enlist her aid to pressure the president for redress.
- 9.
Training materials included: “Sexual Harassment: A Hidden Issue,” “In Case of Sexual Harassment: A Guide for Women on Campus,” “Peer Harassment: Hassles for Women on Campus,” “Writing a Letter to the Harasser: Another Way of Dealing With the Problem,” and “Relating to Each Other: A Questionnaire for Students.”
- 10.
- 11.
Edelman documents that employers are much more likely to win discrimination cases when litigation is pursued. From 2000 to 2014, employers won 75% of district court cases and 81% of circuit court cases (193). Employees experienced complete victories in only 11% of district court cases, 7% of circuit court cases, and 4% of pretrial adjudication (193). Although the percentage of cases involving intersectional claims has increased dramatically from less than 10% in 1979s to more than 25% in 1990s, judges not only defer more to the mere existence of anti-discrimination policies in cases involving minority plaintiffs than in cases involving white plaintiffs, they also defer more in cases involving intersectional plaintiffs (black women) and intersectional claims (race and sex discrimination) (190). And ironically, liberal judges defer more often than conservative judges (190).
- 12.
As Black feminist scholars have demonstrated through their sophisticated theorization of intersectionality, genders are always raced and mediated by class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and multiple vectors of power in particular contexts. Due to limitations of space, this chapter cannot do justice to the complexities of racial harassment and racialized power. For analyses of race-gendered institutions, see Hawkesworth 2003, 2016.
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Hawkesworth, M. (2020). Theorizing Gender Power and Gendered Institutions: Sexual Harassment and Resistance to Feminist Activism. In: Fenstermaker, S., Stewart, A.J. (eds) Gender, Considered. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48501-6_5
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