Sexual Harassment of Working Women

Introduction

MacKinnon wrote the book while still a law student and published it with Yale University Press in 1979. Using women’s accounts and early court cases, she argues that sexual harassment at work is not a personal matter between individuals but discrimination because of sex, prohibited by Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. She distinguishes harassment made a condition of employment, “quid pro quo”, from harassment that creates a hostile working environment. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted both forms in its guidelines of 1980, and the Supreme Court recognised the second in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986).

More works by Catharine A. MacKinnon

• 1989Toward a Feminist Theory of the State