'Equal' turns to sexual harassment

PART FOUR
HARASSMENT (1974-1986)

14. No Law

Mechelle Vinson had risen quickly at Capital City Federal Bank in the District of Columbia and had received outstanding reviews.Her manager, Sidney Taylor, had risen from janitor to first assistant vice president. But Taylor was behaving sexually toward Mechelle's co-worker, Christina. Christina eventually got fired and Taylor, according to Vinson, turned his attentions toward her. Taylor has denied most of it. According to Vinson, Taylor forced her to have sex many times in the bank, even locked in a vault, frequently remarking, “I give you a paycheck.”

Many other women were giving similar accounts in court, only to find that they were completely unprotected by the law.

15. Naming Sexual Harassment

It wasn't until 1975 that the term sexual harassment was coined in a letter from the Human Affairs Program of Cornell University. In a “Dear Sisters” letter, sent to lawyers around the country, a group of women referred to “sexual harassment” as a pervasive problem in the workplace and asked for information to assist them in organizing. One of the recipients was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and another was Catharine MacKinnon.

MacKinnon was the daughter of a Minnesota state legislator and congressman who would be named to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals by Richard Nixon, with whom he passed the Taft-Hartley Act and investigated Alger Hiss. Her applications to Yale Law School received short shrift but she was eventually admitted after six years of trying. Her 1987 doctoral dissertation in political science for Yale and her 1989 book for Harvard University Press would be titled “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.”