Sexual Harassment: Crime, Discrimination, or Just Bad Business?

The title of this anthology—and the conference that sparked it-Women in the Public Sphere, covers a lot of ground. Indeed, it could itself generate an entire volume just on the question of whether there is such a thing as a “public sphere” cleanly demarcated from a corresponding “private” sphere. This essay concentrates on one area of women’s lives that inevitably implicates that question—the area of work. More specifically, it focuses on sex at work. For many years, sex at work was viewed by U.S. law as a private matter between the parties involved, rather than as a “public” issue subject to legal regulation. Beginning in the 1970s, however, some forms of sex at work—those that are “unwelcome” to one of those parties—have been increasingly regulated by law, most notably federal civil rights law. American courts began to interpret Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment on such bases as race, religion, and sex, as reaching a particular kind of sex discrimination in employment called “sexual harassment.”