This paper is a study of the history of the awareness and understanding of the issue of sexual harassment as it first came to be defined in a legal case in 1977, as it had progressed when the Clarence Thomas hearings thrust it into public consciousness in 1991, and as the problem has come to be thought about in 1996, when suits against corporate giants such as Mitsubishi and Astra USA have come to routinely define harassment and emphasize the unacceptable nature of such discrimination. Although high-profile cases have arisen within the U.S. Navy (most notably in the Tailhook Convention scandal), in high schools and universities (where the problem can be harassment by a professor or by a fellow student), and in politics (the case of Senator Bob Packwood offers a significant example), this paper will concentrate specifically on the historical development of the definition of sexual harassment as a corporate problem. As more and more women have entered the workplace, particularly within fields previously dominated by men, sexual harassment has become one of the most significant issues in the societal adjustment to a changing work force. Although men have also made isolated cases of sexual harassment charges against women, women against women, and men against men, this paper will focus on the vast majority of cases, in which the accuser is a woman charging a man with harassing her sexually.
In his history of social welfare in the United States, Walter I. Trattner (1979) barely touches on women's concerns of any kind as significant social welfare issues, even though the impact of women in the work force, equal pay for equal work, the "feminization" of poverty, and other related issues specific to women are widely considered to be important social issues in the decades after World War II. His primary comment on the entire discussion is dismissive:
For various reasons - the rising divorce rate, the "empty-nest" syndrome, the Wome...