Directions in Sexual Harassment Law

CATHAlUNE A MACKINNON & REVA B. SIEGEL EDS. FORTHCOMING YALE PRESS 2003

Introduction

A Short History of Sexual Harassment

REVA B. SIEGEL

Some two decades after the federal courts first recognized sexual harass-
ment as a form of sex discrimination, debate still continues about what sexual
harassment is, why it might be sex discrimination, and what law can and
should do about it. Many voices take up these questions in the pages to follow.
In this introduction I will describe the historical foundations of this conversa-
tion, a conversation that continues without sign of diminishing, in the work-
place and the popular press, as well as in such academic fora as the conference
from which this book grew.
What can history bring to our understanding of sexual harassment? Sexual
harassment is a social practice. Social practices have lives, institutional lives
and semiotic lives. And so social practices like sexual harassment have his-
tories. Considering sexual harassment in historical perspective allows us to
ask some fundamental questions about the nature of the practice, the terms
in which it has been contested, and the rules and rhetorics by which law
constrains-or enables-the conduct in question.
My object in these pages i~ tQ invite r.eflection, not only about sexual harass-
ment, but also about the law of sex discrimination itself. It is only quite
recently that sexual harassment acquired the name of "sexual harassment"
and was prohibited as a form of "sex discrimination." By examining the pro-
cess through which a persistent and pervasive practice came to be recognized

r
2 Reva B. Siegel

as discrimination "on the basis of sex," we learn much about what law does
when it recognizes discrimination.
Clearly, this act of recognition was a momentous one. For the first time in
history, women extracted from law the means to fight a practice with which
they had been struggling for centuries. And yet, when we consider this de-
velopment from a historical vantage point, it becomes plain that legal recogni-
tion of sexual harassment as sex discrimination was at one and the same time a
process of misrecognition- involving a sometimes strange account of the
practice in issue. On a moment's reflection, this is not terribly surprising.
When law recognizes the harms inflicted by social practices, it is intervening in
the social world it is describing, both enabling and constraining challenges to
the social order of which the practices are a part.
For this reason, the language of discrimination is a specialized language, one
that describes the social world in selective ways. When we in turn talk about a
practice in the language of discrimination, we are viewing the world through
this conceptual filter. Recourse to history supplies one way in which we can
think about the languages in which we characterize the social world, to con-
sider what work they are doing, and to ask again what work we might have
them do.
It is in that spirit that I offer the following short history of sexual harass-
ment, as a prelude to a much larger conversation, and as a provocation of
sorts: an invitation to meditate, yet again, on what we mean when we say that
a practice discriminates "on the basis of sex." The longer I think about what
that proposition might mean, the more I appreciate how its elusive meaning is
the very source of its power-its maddening capacity to excite and to deaden
curiosity, to challenge and to legitimate the social arrangements that make
men men and women women.
It is with a view to continuing a several-decades-old conversation about
what discrimination "on the basis of sex" might mean that I begin my short
history of sexual harassment at a time well before anyone dreamed of describ-
ing the practice in such terms. I begin my story, quite self-consciously, with a
provisional account of what sexual harassment might be and end by speculat-
ing about some ways that the practice seems to be changing in our own day. In
this way, I hope to survey the terrain of the debate that the essays in this book
join- a debate about what sexual harassment is and what law should do
about it, a debate about the terms in which we describe apd remedy the
wrongs we have only recently come to call "discrimination."
 Introduction 3

Some Historical Perspectives on the Practice, Protest,

and Regulation of Sexual Harassment
The practice of sexual harassment is centuries old -at least, if we define
sexual harassment as unwanted sexual relations imposed by superiors on sub-
ordinates at work. For example, sexual coercion was an entrenched feature of
chattel slavery endured by African-American women without protection of
law. 1 While there were crucial differences in the situation of free women em-
ployed in domestic service, they, too, commonly faced sexual advances by men
of the households in which they worked. 2 Surviving accounts of women em-
ployed in manufacturing and clerical positions in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries also point to a variety of contexts in which men imposed
sexual relations- ranging from assault to all manner of unwanted physical or
verbal advances- on women who worked for them. 3
Nor was this sex shrouded in silence. Since the antebellum period, there has
been public discussion of women's vulnerability to coerced sexual relations at
work. To be sure, Americans often blamed women's sexual predicament on
women themselves; both slaves and domestic servants were often judged re-
sponsible for their own "downfall" because they were promiscuous by na-
ture.4 Yet an equally powerful line of public commentary condemned men for
sexually abusing the women who worked for them. The abolitionist press, for
example,· "was particularly fond of stories that involved the sexual abuse of
female slaves by their masters"5 as such stories directly put in issue the moral-
ity and legitimacy of slavery. And sexual relationships between women and the
men for whom they worked as domestic servants were, if anything, even more
volubly discussed. Over the decades, governmental hearings and reports, as
well as all manner of commentary in the public press, delved into this and
other aspects of the "servant problem."6 Thus, by the close of the nineteenth
century, we .find Helen Campbell's I887 report on Women Wage-Workers
invoking the common understanding that "[h]ousehold service has become
synonymous with the worst degradation that comes to woman." 7 Campbell
also described in some detail the forms of sexual extortion practiced upon
women who worked in factories and in the garment industry. 8 Along similar
lines, Upton Sinclair's I905 expose, The Jungle/ dramatized the predicament
of women in the meat-packing industry by comparing the forms of sexual
coercion practiced in "wage slavery" and chattel slavery:

Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the
verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim
of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under
such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it
4 Reva B. Siegel

was under the system of chattel slavery. Things that were quite unspeakable
went on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted by
everybody; only they did not show, as in the old slavery times, because there
was no difference in color between the master and slave .10

As public commentators such as Campbell and Sinclair and the abolitionists

before them well appreciated, the American legal system offered women scant
protection from sexual coercion at work. Rape was, of course, punishable by
law; but the criminal law did not protect slaves from rape, 11 and it defined the
elements of rape so restrictively that most free women sexually coerced at
work would have little reason to expect the state to sanction the men who took
advantage of them.
Few women were willing to endure the damage to reputation and prospects
for marriage that followed from bringing a rape complaint, and if they did, the
prospects for vindication of their complaint were remote indeed. The common
law required a woman claiming rape to make a highly scripted showing that
sexual relations were nonconsensual; she had to show that sex was coerced by
force and against her will 12 -that she succumbed to overpowering physical
force despite exerting the "utmost resistance." 13 Economic coercion did not
suffice, nor was most physical resistance enough to satisfy the co.mmon law
requirement of "utmost resistance." New York's high court explained in r 874,
as it rejected a rape prosecution of a man who forcibly assaulted his fourteen-
year-old servant girl, after sending away her younger siblings and locking her
in his barn: "Can the mind conceive of a woman, in the possession of her
faculties and powers, revoltingly unwilling that this deed should be done upon
her, who would not resist so hard and so long as she was able? And if a
woman, aware that it will be done unless she does resist, does not resist to the
extent of her ability on the occasion, must it not be that she is not entirely
reluctant? If consent, though not express, enters into her conduct, there is no
rape." 14
In short, the law assumed that women in fact wanted the sexual advances
and assaults that they claimed injured them. Unless women could show that
they had performed an elaborate ritual of resistance, perfect compliance with
the legally specified terms of which was necessary to overcome the overwhelm-
ing presumption that women latently desired whatever was sexually done to
them, they could expect little recourse from the criminal law. Rape law's
protection was further vitiated by the fact that prosecutors and judges relied
on all kinds of race- and class-based assumptions about the "promiscnous"
natures of the women in domestic service and other forms of market labor as
they reasoned about utmost resistance. 15
 Introduction 5

Tort law was only marginally more effective as a weapon against sexual
coercion at work. Initially, tort law gave women no right to recover damages
for sexual assault. At common law, sexual assault gave rise to an action for
damages insofar as it inflicted an injury on a man's property interest in the
woman who was assaulted; thus, a master might have a claim in trespass 1
against a man who raped his slave, 16 or a father niight bring a seduction action
against an employer who impregnated or otherwise defiled his daughter. 17 ;
When American law eventually began to recognize a woman's right to recover
for sexual· injury in her own right-whether through an action for seduction
or indecent assault- tort law developed a specialized body of law on "sexual"
touchings that incorporated doctrines of consent from the criminal law of
rape. 18 By the early twentieth: century, some jurisdictions moderated the con-
sent requirement in actions for indecent assault, but none seems to have relin-
quished it. 19 The tort action for seduction, by contrast, seems to have been
more plastic, as it evolved from an action designed to recompense a father's
economic injli.ry (when it focused on his daughter's out-of-wedlock preg-
nancy) to an action designed to recompense injuries to a father's honor (when
it focused his daughter's loss of virginity) to an action designed to recompense
women directly for injuries suffered in "sexual connexion." 20 In this newly
configured form, Lea VanderVelde reports, by the late nineteenth century
there were at least some seduction cases in which "the coercive force of words
of economic threat were sufficient to render the sexual predation redress-
ible."21 But this development was by no means uniform across jurisdictions22
and was, moreover, short-lived: by the early twentieth century, many states
began legislatively to repeal the tort of seduction along with other "heart-
balm" actions.23
The law's failure to protect women from sexual predation at work did not, of
course, pass unnoticed; it has been a subject of protest since the days of the
antislavery movement. We might count in this tradition abolitionist Henry
Wright's description of South Carolina as "one great legalized and baptized
brothel,"24 or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,Z 5 or the
petitions of Henry McNeal Turner and other African-American men in the
aftermath of the Civil War who protested the sexual violation of black women
in domestic service: "All we ask of the white man is to let our ladies alone, and
they need not fear us." 26 As the story of Turner's petition reminds us, the parties
most interested in achieving law reform in such matters were for the most part
disfranchised. Petition thus emerged as a crucial weapon in the campaign. For
example, even before the movement for woman suffrage emerged in the r84os,
women's moral reform societies had begun to wage petition campaigns de-
signed to persuade state legislatures to enact legal penalties for seduction.27The
6 Reva B. Siegel

campaign to reform tort law had both practical and expressive purposes.
Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child described the dignitary affront of a tort regime
that recognized the sexual injury of women as an economic loss to men. She
protested the common law of seduction as it denied to women the legal subjec-
tivity to sustain sexual injury and the legal agency to secure its redress, and
argued that women had internalized their devaluation and objectification by
law: "[A) woman must acknowledge herself the servant of some-body, who
may claim wages for her lost time! ... It is a standing insult to womankind; and
had we not become the slaves we are deemed in law, we should rise en masse ...
and sweep the contemptible insult from the statute-book.''28
With the rise of the woman's rights movement in the decade before the Civil
War, some of its more vocal spokespersons began to discuss the socioeco-
nomic conditions that made women susceptible to sexual coercion. The por-
trait they painted of heterosexual interaction was completely at odds with the
common law's, insofar as it presented coercion as the normal rather than
deviant condition of heterosexual relations. On this account, restrictions on
women's labor market participation ("crowding") and the systematic depres-
sion of their wages left women as a class dependent on men for economic
support, and it was in this condition of "pecuniary dependence" that men
could extract their sexual compliance, in and out of marriage. 29 As Ernestine
Rose explained at an r8 56 woman's rights convention: "What was left for her
but to sell herself for food and clothing either in matrimony or out of it; and it
would require a wise head to determine which was the worse.'' 30
In this critique of marriage as "legalized prostitution" 31 the woman's rights
movement had begun to analyze the political economy of heterosexuality in a
way that took as structurally interconnected the institutions of marriage and
market. This socioeconomic understanding of sexual relations shaped the
movement's response to the trial of domestic servant Hester Vaughn in the
aftermath of the Civil War. Vaughn was fired by her employer when she be-
came pregnant by him; she gave birth alone, ill, and impoverished, and was
found several days later with her dead infant by her side, adjudged guilty of
infanticide, and sentenced to death. 32 As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, and other woman's rights advocates publicized the Vaughn case,
they pointed to a variety of gendered injustices that cumulatively sealed
Vaughn's fate-an analysis that started with the gender and class restrictions
that drove Vaughn to domestic service, and the sexual vulnerability her eco-
nomic dependency engendered.33 For the woman's rights movement, the
Vaughn case presented an occasion to protest the economic arrangements and
social understandings that visited the judgment of death on Vaughn for a
 Introduction 7

predicament the woman's movement judged society as a whole-and men in

particular- culpable.
The woman's rights movement responded to Vaughn's case with wide-
ranging social critique and an equally wide-ranging remedy. The movement
drew on Vaughn's case to protest the injustice of women's exclusion from jury
service and suffrage and, after persuading the governor of Pennsylvania to
pardon her, turned the Vaughn episode in the direction of its larger quest for
political empowerment. 34 During the late nineteenth century, only the Wom-
an's Christian Temperance Union mounted a sustained effort to reform laws
protecting women from sexual predation; as Jane Larson has recounted, their
effort took the form of a national campaign to raise the age of consent for
statutory rape law. 35 While the campaign spoke the language of moral purity,
Larson has shown that it was centrally preoccupied with the failure of rape
law to protect women from sexual predation, and at least some of its centrally
publicized cases involved the sexual exploitation of young women workers. 36
For the most part, efforts to protect working women from sexual coercion
in the early twentieth century focused, not on law reform, but on other modes
of collective self-help. For example, in I 908, settlement workers Grace Abbott
and Sophonisba Breckinridge took a saloon-keeper to court who fired a young
barmaid when he discovered that she was about to bear a child by him; after
losing the case, Abbott and Breckinridge they turned to organizing immigrant
protectiye associations to provide young working women alternate bases of
community support. 37 Outside the settlement movement, various labor activ-
ists addressed the issue of women's vulnerability to sexual coercion at work as
part of a more wide-ranging effort to organize working women. 38 But as Lisa
Granik relates, there were pressures on women workers struggling to organize
that caused them to defer gender-specific demands- such as protection from
sexual coercion- in favor of traditional union demands such as seniority
rights. 39
Even so, the fusion of labor and feminist advocacy agendas in the progressive
era bore critical fruit. In I 9 I 6, for example, socialist-feminist Emma Goldman
elaborated the "legal prostitution" critique of the nineteenth-century woman's
rights movement in her influential essay "The Traffic in Women": "Nowhere is
woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is
therefore almost inevitable that she would pay for her right to exist, to keep a
position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree
whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men.
Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of
woman is responsible for prostitution."40
8 Reva B. Siegel

Women in the early feminist and labor movements never managed to orga-
nize a sustained assault on the set of practices we have come to call "sexual
harassment," but they did articulate an indictment of the practices that antici-
pated many of the arguments that women in the modem feminist and labor
movements voiced in the 1970s.

The Rise of Sexual Harassment Law:

Regulating Sexual Harassment as Sex Discrimination
As we have· seen, the practice and protest of sexual harassment have a
long history, in which we can situate developments of the 1970s as a recent
and relatively short chapter. But these developments nonetheless represent a
dramatic turning point in social and legal understandings of the practice.
In the 1970s Catharine MacKinnon and Lin Farley and the many other
lawyers and activists who represented women in and out of court were able to
mount a concerted assault, of unprecedented magnitude and force, on the
practice of sexual harassment. Responding on many fronts to the demands of
the second-wave feminist movement, the American legal system began slowly
to yield to this challenge, and for the first time recognized women's right to
work free of unwanted sexual advances.
How did this come about? Sexual harassment law arose, first and foremost,
from women acting as part of a· social movement speaking out about their
experiences as women at work; the term "sexual harassment" itself grew out
of a consciousness-raising session Lin Farley held in I 97 4 as part of a Cornell
University course on women and work. 41 But more was required for the Amer-
ican legal system to recognize this experience of gendered harm as a form of
legal injury, when for centuries it had refused. We could speculate for a long
time about the convergence of social forces and social understandings that
en a bled legal recognition of the sexual harassment claim- a story involving
differences in the movements for race and gender emancipation in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, shifts in women's labor force participation,
and much more. But for present purposes I would like to consider the question
in rather modest terms. What new ways of talking about the harms of a
centuries-old practice enabled its recharacterization as unlawful conduct?

FEMI~IST ACCOUNTS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT

AS SEX DISCRIMINATION .
As we know, the practice of subjecting employees to unwanted sexual
advances at work was made legally actionable under a particular legal regime,
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.42 During the 1970s, lawyers, advo-
 Introduction 9

cates, and theorists had to persuade the American judiciary that sexual harass-
ment is "discrimination on the basis of sex." For this to happen, the injuries
inflicted on women by sexual coercion at work had to be presented to courts in
terms that could be assimilated to a body of law adopted to regulate practices
of racial segregation in the workplace. Catharine MacKinnon's analysis in
Sexual Harassment of Working Women 43 - a stunningly brilliant synthesis of
lawyering and legal theory- played a crucial role in this process.
I want now briefly to revisit the 1970s campaign, with a view to understand-
ing the legal system's "reception" of the sexual harassment claim, its transla-
tion into antidiscrimination discourse. By considering how MacKinnon and
Farley described the injury of sexual harassment, and how judges interpreting
federal employment discrimination law explained the harm of the practice, we
learn much, not only about sexual harassment, but, just as important, about
what law does when it recognizes claims of discrimination.
Writing in the 1970s, MacKinnon and Farley had only sketchy knowledge
of the history we have just surveyed; much of this scholarship was produced as
an outgrowth of the same set of social transformations that gave rise to the
sexual harassment claim in the 1970s. Nevertheless, there are certain striking
parallels between their arguments, and arguments advanced by Child, Rose,
Stanton, Anthony, and Goldman before them. Like these early advocates,
MacKinnon and Farley understood the sexual coercion women encountered
at work as part of the larger political economy of heterosexuality, a social
order that situates sexual relations between men and women in relations of
economic dependency between men and women, an order in which marriage
and market play reinforcing roles in the reproduction of women's social subor-
dination as a class. 44 As MacKinnon wrote in 1979: "Sexual harassment per-
petuates the interlocked structure by which women have been kept sexually in
thrall to men and at the bottom of the labor market. Two forces of American
society converge: men's control over women's sexuality and capital's control
over employees' work lives. Women historically have been required to ex-
change sexual services for material survival, in one form or another. Prostitu-
tion and marriage as well as sexual harassment in different ways institutional-
ize this arrangement."45
Farley and MacKinnon each then proceeded to read the sexual advances
constituting harassment within a semiotics of status inequality. Farley defined
sexual harassment as the "unsolicited nonreciprocal male behavior that as-
serts a woman's sex role over her function as a worker."46 Drawing on sources
as diverse as Adrienne Rich and Erving Goffman, Farley asserted that the
practice of sexual harassment was properly understood within the «micropoli-
tics" of "the patriarchy." She drew upon psychologists and sociologists to
 I o Reva B. Siegel

decode the pract.lce as part of "the communication of power between per-

sons," insisting that "sex is hardly the real meaning of much male behavior at
work."47 MacKinnon, in a now-familiar voice, tersely remarked: "Sexual as-
sault as experienced during sexual harassment seems less than an ordinary act
of sexual desire directed toward the wrong person than an expression of
dominance laced with impersonal contempt, the habit of getting what one
wants, and the perception (usually accurate) that the situation can be safely
exploited in this way-all expressed sexually. It is dominance eroticized."48
MacKinnon located this relationship within a system of social relations that
divided the workforce into gender-marked roles that sexualized inequality on
the model of marriage: "Work relationships parallel traditional home relation-
ships between husband and wife" so that "women's employment outside the
home tends to monetize the roles and tasks women traditionally perform for
men in the home." 49
Looking back at Farley and MacKinnon's arguments, we can discern the
basic outlines of a social account of gender. Social stratification along lines of
gender has material and dignitary dimensions; it is produced by the interaction
of social structure (institutions, practices) and social meaning (stories, rea-
sons );50 sexual harassment is part of the relations of distribution and recogni-
tion both.51
This set of understandings played a central role in MacKinnon's argument
that sexual harassment was sex discrimination: "Practices which express and
reinforce the social inequality of women to men are clear cases of sex-based
discrimination in the inequality approach!' 52 She then illustrated how sexual
· harassment expressed and reinforced sexual inequality as a matter of social
structure and social meaning: for example, "Sexual harassment is discrimina-
tion 'based on sex' within the social meaning of sex, as the concept is socially
incarnated in sex roles. Pervasive and 'accepted' as they are, these rigid roles
have no place in the allocation of social and economic resources." 53 Of course,
in so arguing, MacKinnon was engaged in a creative act of resistance, couch-
ing the claim that sexual harassment was sex discrimination in terms that
expressed the experiential and theoretical understanding of harassment that
had emerged from the women's movement, even as her arguments diverged
from the conceptual framework in which the American legal system had come
to apprehend race and sex discrimination by the mid-I970s.
This set of more conventional legal understandings MacKinnon termed the
"differences approach": "The basic question the differences approach poses is:
how can you tell that this happened because one is a woman, rather than to a
person who just happens to be a woman? The basic answer ... is: a man in her
position would not be or was not so treated." 54 Employers may take all kinds
 Introduction II

of adverse employment actions against women; what they may not do is treat
women employees differently than they treat, or would treat, male employees.
Note how, on this conception of discrimination, the harm of sexual harass-
ment no longer involves interaction of social structure and social meaning, but
instead reduces to an inquiry into the criteria by which an employersorts
employees. MacKinnon offered a variety of arguments that sexual harassment
was sex discrimination on the differences approach, while at the same time
conducting a detailed diagnosis of how the antidiscrimination tradition was
misrecognizing status harm in the course of recognizing discrimination. 55
Without rehearsing the different iterations of disparate treatment and dispa-
rate impact arguments MacKinnon and others offered in briefing the sexual
harassment claim in more conventional legal terms, I would like, in the inter-
ests of concision, to consider how, as a matter of history, the American legal
system made sense of the proposition that sexual harassment was sex discrimi-
nation within the meaning of Title VII. Much was gained, and lost, in this act
of "recognition."

RESISTANCE AND (MIS)RECOGNITION:

HOW COURTS TRANSFORMED SEXUAL HARASSMENT DISCOURSE.
At first, courts simply refused to acknowledge that sexual harassment
had anything to do with employment discrimination on the basis of sex. Sex-
ual harassment was rejected as a personal matter having nothing to do with
work 56 or a sexual assault that just happened to occur at work .57 Alternatively,
judges reasoned that sexual harassment was natural and inevitable and noth-
ing that law could reasonably expect to eradicate from work. 58 But the central
ground on which courts resisted recognizing the claim was simply that sexual
harassment was not discrimination "on the basis of sex." It could happen to a
man or woman or both;59 even if its harms were inflicted on women only, they
were not inflicted on all women, only those who refused their supervisors'
advances. 60 It is worth examining the objections to recognizing sexual harass-
ment as sex discrimination set forth in these early cases, and the legal argu-
ments that ultimately prevailed against them. By reconstructing the process
through which courts came to reason that that sexual harassment discrimi-
nates "on the basis of sex," we learn much about the ways that antidiscrimina-
tion law selectively constrains practices that sustain social stratification.61
Courts initially offered two reasons to support the judgment that super-
visors who subjected employees to unwanted sexual advances did not discrim-
inate on the basis of sex. The first objection was that the practice did not
systematically differentiate among employees by sex. As one district court
reasoned: "In this instance the supervisor was male and the employee was
r2 Reva B. Siegel

female. But no immutable principle of psychology compels this alignment of

parties. The gender lines might as easily have been reversed or even not crossed
at all. While sexual desire animated the parties, or at least one of them, the
gender of each is incidental to the claim of abuse." 62 This objection was an-
swered, famously, in the I977 case of Barnes v. Costle,63 by Judge Spottswood
Robinson, when he located the act of class-categorical discrimination in the
presumed sexual orientation of the harasser: The plaintiff in that case, he
noted, alleged her supervisor had conditioned "retention of her job ... upon
submission to sexual relations an exaction which the supervisor would not
have sought from any male," and, Robinson noted, "there is no suggestion
that appellant's allegedly amorous supervisor is other than heterosexua1." 64
On this model, Robinson explained,
a similar condition could be imposed on a male subordinate by a heterosexual
female superior, or upon a subordinate of either gender by a homosexual
superior of the same gender. In each instance, the legal problem would be
identical to that confronting us now: the exaction of a condition which, but
for his or her sex, the employee would not have faced. These situations, like
that at bar, are to be distinguished from a bisexual superior who conditions
the employment opportunities of a subordinate- of either gender upon par-
ticipation ·in a sexual affair. In the case of the bisexual supervisor, the insis-
tence upon sexual favors would not constitute gender discrimination because
it would apply to male and female employees alike. 65
In this strange juridical moment, we see sexual harassment defined as sex
discrimination through a narrative of sexual orientation. Monosexual ha-
rassers discriminate on the basis of sex, bisexual harassers do not. 66 Judge
Robinson notes the status inequality between the supervisor and subordinate
pressured for sexual attention, yet does not emphasize it in explaining why the
supervisor's sexual attentions are sexually discriminatory. Instead, Judge Rob-
inson reasons about discrimination as differentiation, arguing that harassers
who are interested only in members of one sex discriminate on the basis of sex
as they select subordinates from whom to demand sexual relations. The ha-
rasser's sexual orientation thus supplies the act of group-based differentiation
that makes the sexual overture between supervisor and subordinate sexually
discriminatory. So framed, there would seem to be no further ground of dis-
pute, with a dare posed to the harasser: "Well, you're not going to claim you're
that kind of man ... "
The sexual orientation argument advanced in Barnes would ultimately
prove persuasive to many. But, at the time of the decision, there was yet
another ground on which defendants argued and courts held that sexual rela-
tions between supervisors and their employees did not amount to discrimina-
 Introduction I3

tion "on the basis of sex." In the words of the district court in Barnes, "The
substance of plaintiff'& complaint is that she was discriminated against, not
because she was a woman, but because she refused to engage in an affair with
her supervisor."67 Even if the plaintiff's sex was a "but-for cause" of the rela-
tionship on the "orientation" account above, her sex was not the sole ground
of distinction; the employer selected among women employees, using some
criterion in addition to and putatively distinct from the plaintiff's "sex." 68
Because the supervisor had targeted some, but not all, class members for
sexual attention, his harassing conduct did not amount to discrimination "on
the basis of sex."
The Supreme Court itself gave stature to such arguments when it ruled in
I974 that statutes regulating employees on the basis of pregnancy were not
sex-based for purposes of Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection analysis, a
rule that the Court then applied to the interpretation of federal employment
discrimination law in I976. 69 In the Court's reasoning, a policy refusing em-
ployment disability benefits to pregnant women discriminated on the basis of
pregnancy, not on the basis of sex: "[t]he program divides potential recipients
into two groups- pregnant women and nonpregnant persons. While the first
group is exclusively female, the second includes members of both sexes." 70 In
other words, it was not enough for the plaintiff to show that the challenged
policy affected members of one group only; the plaintiff would have to show
that the challenged policy affected all members of the targeted group before
the court would characterize the policy as discriminating "on the basis of sex."
During the I970s, the federal judiciary invoked this formalistic conception
of discrimination to explain why some sex-dependent practices were not "sex-
based" and relieve defendants of the obligation to justify them under constitu~
tional or statutory antidiscrimination laws. Employers eagerly seized upon the
defense. Businesses argued that employers were not discriminating on the
basis of sex (so did not have to supply a "bona fide occupational qualifica-
tion"71 defense) when they refused to give employment benefits to women who
were pregnant,72 or to hire women with pre-school age children, 73 or women
who were married, 74 or men with long hair, 75 or women in pants suits,76
or gays and lesbians77 or men with effeminate mannerisms78 - or to retain
women who wouldn't sleep with their supervisors.79 All these policies singled
out members of one sex and imposed conditions on their employment that
preserved traditional gender roles in the workplace. Yet courts applying Title
VII law did not characterize the policies as openly discriminating on the basis
of sex and so require employers to supply business justifications for the poli-
cies that would meet the rigorous "bona fide occupational qualification" ex-
ception to Title Vll's antidiscrimination norm. Instead, courts characterized
 I4 Reva B. Siegel

the challenged practices as "sex-plus" policies, policies that discriminated on

the basis of "sex" "plus" some other putatively neutral criterion (hair length,
type of dress, mannerisms, orientation, or "willingness to furnish sexual con-
sideration").80 Courts elaborating sex-plus doctrine reasoned that the statu-
tory prohibition on policies that discriminate "on the basis of sex" applied to
policies that affected (I) only class members and (2) all class members. A
challenged practice would have to sort all employees into two perfectly sex-
differentiated groups before the sorting operation amounted to discrimination
on the basis of sex. 8 1
The court that dubbed this area of Title VII law the "sex-plus" doctrine was
quite frank about the larger social concern animating the doctrine. "We must
decide ... whether Congress intended to include all sexual distinctions in its
prohibition of discrimination (based solely on sex or on 'sex plus'), or whether
a line can legitimately be drawn beyond which employer conduct is no longer
within reach of the statute." 82 After consulting the legislative history of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the court concluded that Congress had added the
prohibition on sex discrimination to the statute without much deliberation,
and thus, "in all probability did not intend for its proscription of sexual dis-
crimination to have significant and sweeping implications." 83 In short, the
declared object of sex-plus doctrine was to protect traditional ways of doing
business from disruption by the antidiscrimination statute. 84 With this goal in
view, the court held that only certain sex-plus policies discriminated "on the
basis of sex" within the meaning of Title VII- those that discriminated on the
basis of sex "plus" an immutable trait or fundamental right (e.g., marital
status or having children). ss ·
Given these developments in Title VII law during the 19708, sexual-
harassment defendants advanced a plausible claim when they argued, as the
federal agencies defending early cases did, that sexual harassment was not
discrimination on the basis of sex, but instead discrimination on the basis of
"willingness to furnish sexual consideration." 86 The two federal courts that
first rejected this defense waded in long-winded fashion through a maze of
Title VII precedents, searching for grounds on which logically to separate
sexual harassment from the other "sex-plus" practices that federal courts had
already declared did not discriminate on the basis of sex. 87 In the end, Judge
Robinson, writing for the D.C. Circuit in Barnes, simply asserted: "A sex-
founded impediment to equal employment opportunity succumbs to Title VII
even though less than all employees of the claimant's gender are affected." 88
But Robinson did not simply decide the matter by fiat. Reading the opinion
more closely, one uncovers a normative justification for the holding in Barnes
that sounds in a different tenor than the "bisexual harasser"- a justification
 Introduction I 5

rooted in the experience and animating commitments of this civil rights pi-
oneer. 89 (The Barnes opinion is written with a particularly rich consciousness
of race/gender intersections as, not only the judge, but also the plaintiff and
her alleged harasser, the director of the equal employment opportunity office
for the Environmental Protection Agency, are black.)90 Barnes concludes its
discussion of the sex-plus problem by pointing to cases where employees had
been dismissed for engaging in interracial sexual relations, and notes that in
each of these cases "a cause of action was recognized although it did not
appear that any other individual of the same gender or race had been mis-
treated by the employer."91 At one and the same time, the Barnes opinion
demonstrates that there are formal inconsistencies in the ways that Title Vll
law defines "discrimination on the basis of sex," and insists that questions
about how to characterize practices under the statute should be resolved on
normative rather than formal grounds. Just as prohibitions on interracial sex-
ual relationships play a role in the perpetuation of racial inequality, Barnes
suggests, coerced sexual relations in the workplace play a role in the perpetua-
tion of gender inequality. Thus, in taking the momentous step of recognizing
sexual harassment as sex discrimination, the court reasoned about the practice
as perpetuating group status inequalities and not simply group-based differen-
tiation. Robinson concludes his opinion in Barnes- the first appellate opinion
recognizing the sexual harassment cause ofaction- by quoting from Rogers v.
EEOC, 92 the first appeJlate to recognize a hostile environment claim of racial
harassment under Title Vll: Congress deliberately left the language of Title Vll
open-ended," 'knowing that constant change is the order of our day and that
the seemingly reasonable practices of the present can easily become the in-
justices of the morrow.' "93
While the first cases recognizing the sexual harassment claim as a form of
sex discriminatiop under Title Vll labored mightily with the "sex-plus" prob-
lem,94 the issue simply disappeared thereafter. Federal courts still use sex-plus
doctrine to remove a variety of sex-specific policies from Title VII scrutiny
(employers may refuse to hire women who wear pants, men who wear dresses,
women who date women, men who display "effeminate" mannerisms),95 yet
no one remembers that sexual harassment was once legally grouped with these
practices, disaggregated into a policy based on "sex plus refusal to furnish sex-
ual consideration." Plainly, if we are to account for the different doctrinal
analysis of sexual harassment and sex-specific grooming codes under Title Vll
today, we would have to seek an explanation in the domain of social, not for-
mal, logic. Today, under Title Vll employers may not fire women who refuse
to sleep with them, but they may fire women who sleep with other women.
The gender transformations of the I970S persuaded the federal judiciary that
z6 Reva B. Siegel

some; though surely not all, features of heterosexual social practice were at
odds with the nation's egalitarian commitments.
We can thus read the formal distinctions in the 1970s case law as remnants
of a larger social struggle, doctrinal residue of a wide-ranging debate about
whether and how law would intervene in a fieid of contested gender rela-
tions.96 (We might liken this dispute to arguments about whether separate-
but-equal was discrimination on the basis of race that took place in the thir-
teen years spanning Brown,97 the per curiams/8 and the Court's ruling in
Loving v. Virginia 99 that antimiscegenation laws unconstitutionally discrimi-
nated on the basis of race- a decision the Court did not hand down until
1967, the same year that Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? won the Academy
Awards. In our own day, we can see a similar dynamic at work as social
movement protest pressures federal courts to decide whether the state's use
of race in suspect descriptions amounts to discrimination "on the basis of
race"- a dispute over the meaning of the equal protection clause in which a
version of "race-plus" figures.)1° 0 In short, judgments about whether prac-
tices discriminate "on the basis" of sex or race may depend on evolving so-
cial intuitions about whether a practice unjustly perpetuates a status regime,
rather than formal characteristics of the practice itself, as antidiscrimination
discourse leads us to believe.
But if judgments a bout whether practices discriminate on the basis of race or
sex are social constructions, shaped by social-movement protest and the like,
we do not, of course, generally experience them or discuss them in such terms.
Antidiscrimination doctrine selectively internalized changes in gen.der norms
during the 1970s without acknowledging the project in which it was engaged.
Even as the Barnes opinion recognizes that sexual harassment is discrimination
on the basis of sex, it still clings to the fiction that it is merely analyzing
discrimination as the practice of sorting sexed bodies: sexual harassment in-
volves "a treatment differential allegedly predicated upon an immutable per-
sonal characteristic gender which subjected appellant to a marked disadvan-.
tage in comparison with men employed at the agency. " 101 Sex discrimination
law, like race discrimination law, pretends that it analyzes distinctions on the
basis of physiologically, rather than sociologically, defined aspects of iden-
tity.102 In this way, antidiscrimination law represses the social history, social
structure, and social meaning of the practice of sexual harassment in the very
act of declaring the pJ;actice a legal wrong.
Consider again the way that doctrine reasons its way to the conclusion that
sexual harassment is sex discrintination. At first, courts viewed the conduct
constituting sexual harassment as completely distinct from practices the law
 Introduction 17

calls sex discrimination; then cases such as Barnes tie the practice of sexual
harassment to the concept of discrimination by means of a narrative that finds
discrimination in the way that persons of monosexual sexual orientation se·
lect sexual objects (on this account, discrimination is an act of differentiation,
a species of taste or desire, and its objects are particular kinds of sexed bodies).
Antidiscrimination law explains how sexual harassment is sex discrimination
in terms that are fundamentally uninterested in the social circumstances of the
harasser's target (for example, her position in an employment hierarchy, her
other economic alternatives if she does not stay employed at this job). It also
excludes from the formal account of why harassment is discrimination "on the
basis of sex" the particulars of what the harasser does to his targets once he
selects her. 103
Finally, and most important, the law's account of sexual harassment as
discriminating "on the basis of sex" does not address the particular kinds of
harm that sexual harassment inflicts on its targets-the ways that it engenders
them. When the sex discrimination in sexual harassment is conceptualized as a
form of desire (selecting appropriately sexed bodies given the nature of one's
orientation), the act of differentiation that makes sexual harassment sex dis-
crimination would appear to be a normal, natural, and fundamentally benign
feature of social life. On this account, the harm of sexual harassment is some·
how incidental to the practice of sex discrimination; the harm arises from an
act of sexual coercion that just happens to be inflicted on a person with a body
sexed female. (This is exactly the understanding expressed by sex-plus doc-
trine when it conceptualizes sexual harassment as "sex" "plus" the "neutral"
criterion of "unwillingness to furnish sexual consideration.") What is more, as
antidiscrimination law begins to recognize sexual harassment as sex discrimi-
nation, it treats the sexual coercion in sexual harassment as a harm so obvious
as not to need explanation or account. But this very failure to explain "the
obvious" means that antidiscrimination law rather unselfconsciously incorpo-
rates a gender-conventional understanding of why harassment harms women
(it is a form of socially inappropriate conduct, "not a nice way to treat a
lady").
And so, as antidiscrimination law recognizes sexual harassment as sex dis-
crimination, it never acknowledges the power dynamic that women over two
centuries have described: the way that men extracting sex from economically
dependent women reiterate a coercive relationship that organizes heterosex-
ual relations in marriage and the market both. Sexual harassment would be
sex discrimination on this account, not because of how it sorts sexed bodies,
but because of how this form of coercion, iterated across social institutions,
18 Reva B. Siegel

constructs the· dignitary and material meanings of sex. Sexual harassment

would be sex discrimination on this account because it engenders as it coerces,
because it is a practice that "makes" women women and men men.
Thus, looking back at the 1970s, we can see that antidiscrimination law
intervened, selectively, in a system of social stratification that elaborated "sex"
in a series of institutions, practices, stories, and reasons that cumulatively
made reasonable, natural, and just a world in which women were (so to speak)
on the bottom and men on the top. But antidiscrimination law explained its
decision selectively to disestablish elements of this social order without de-
scribing the system of status relations in which it was intervening; the law
instead asserted that it was prohibiting arbitrary and irrational distinctions on
the basis of immutable characteristics that denied persons equal opportunity.
This is not at all surprising. Antidiscrimination law intervened in the prac-
tices sustaining gender stratification in much the way it intervened in practices
sustaining racial stratification- that is, without providing a systemic account
of the social order sustained by "discrimination" on the basis of immutable
physiological traits (like race or sex). Silence about the structure of the larger
social·order was, in an important sense, a precondition of the disestablishment
dynamic, a narrative necessity if antidiscrimination law was going to persuade
those with privilege voluntarily to cede (some of) it. Just as antidiscrimination
law gave only the thinnest account of why discriminating on the basis of race
was a wrong (silences that are the subject of ongoing interpretive struggle
today),I 04 so too did it give a terribly thin account of the harms of sex discrimi-
nation, in matters of sexual harassment and elsewhere. Garbling the story of
the harms in issue was in an important sense a creative, enabling act, one that
facilitated characterization of sexual harassment as unlawful conduct.
To summarize: even as antidiscrimination law recognized sexual harass-
ment as a species of sex discrimination, it did so without acknowledging the
larger social arrangements within which the practice of sexual harassment
acquired dignitary meaning and distributive consequence. As we will see,
this silence has proven consequential in various ways- especially because
the practice of sexual harassment seems to have been undergoing important
changes in the very era that courts began to recognize it as a form of sex
discrimination under Title VII.

Contemporary Transformations in
the Practice of Sexual Harassment
To this point in our story, we have considered sexual harassment as a
relatively stable social practice that is an integral part of a variety of hetero-
 Introduction I 9

sexual economic relationships, from slavery to secretarial work. Of course, we

could identify differences in the practice of sexual harassment in these various
institutional settings. For example, when the harassed worker and any off-
spring she might bear are the property of the harasser, different social under-
standings and economic incentives structure the practice than when harasser
and harassee face each other as master and servant or employer and employee.
Still, certain features of the practice seem relatively fixed over time and across
social and legal settings: men pressure women who are working for them into
sexual relations the women do not want. Antidiscrimination law describes the
practice of sexual harassment as performing "desire"; feminist critics describe
the practice of sexual harassment as performing "power" of a sort iterated
throughout the social order. On both accounts, the harasser is using his greater
economic authority and resources to secure sexual access to women he other-
wise would not have.
So understood, we could say that the practice of sexual harassment persisted
in relatively stable terms over the centuries prior to its recognition as an injury
under Title VTI. But in the very era that the courts, began to recognize the sexual
harassment claim, the practice itself was going through striking changes.
During the 1970S, following a period of relative stability in occupational
sex segregation, women began to break into a variety of traditionally male
jobs. 105 Different factors account for these changes, among· them long~term
shifts in women's labor force participation 106 as well as the federal govern-
ment's growing commitment to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.107 In fact, these changes in the degree of occupa-
tional sex segregation were relatively small, and restricted to certain occupa-
tional categories. (For example, from 1970 to 1980, the percentage of women
in administrative positions increased by 11.9 percent, while the percentage of
women in construction work increased by only 1.3 percent to about 1 percent
of the jobs in the industry.)1° 8 But however small these changes, they were
fraught with symbolic import. An active second-wave women's movement
was energetically asserting women's right to partake in traditionally male
practices, preserves, and prerogatives, especially in matters of work. Against
this backdrop even marginal shifts in workplace integration resonated with
larger social import. At stake was the gendered character of work itself.
There was a quite varied repertoire of tactics that men in different occupa-
tional positions used to frustrate women's efforts to participate in forms of
work that were traditionally gendered male. Sexualized attention emerged as a
weapon in this turf war, a means of making women feel so unwelcome that
they would eventually leave. In short, the practice of sexual harassment-
which we have thus far defined as unwanted sexual relations imposed by
20 Reva B. Siegel

superiors on subordinates at work- began to play a new role in political

economy of heterosexuality.
Note how, in this new context, the social meaning of the "sex" in sexual
harassment changes, As early as 1978, Lin Farley-an avid student of Heidi
Hartmann's work on occupational sex segregation-described how sexual
attention shifted semantic registers when directed at women in traditional and
nontraditional forms of employment: "The function of sexual harassment in
nontraditional jobs is to keep women out: its function in the traditional female
job sector is to keep women down." 109 We have already seen that sexualized
conduct in different socioeconomic settings can express different kinds of
social relationships, including relations of inequality. Farley was simply taking
the point a step further: depending on the background conditions (women in
traditional or nontraditional job category) sexualized attention could express
gender inequality of different sorts, communicating messages of institutional
subordination (sexualizing hierarchy) or institutional exclusion (gender-
marking work spaces and roles).
A number of sociologists have analyzed the ways men use sexualized con-
duct to enforce segregation of the workplace. Barbara Bergman describes how
harassment works when directed at women who have invaded traditionally
male jobs or work spaces: "The sexual harassment of women already in male-
dominated occupations appears to take the form of insults, which may include
mock propositions to engage in sexual relations. Such behavior appears to be
motivated by a desire to wound and embarrass the woman, to demonstrate the
men's contempt for her unfeminine behavior in invading their territory, to
show her that they will not accept her as 'one of the boys,' and out of a hope
that she will be made sufficiently uncomfortable to abandon the job."110
Barbara Reskin and Heidi Hartmann add: "When work groups are inte-
grated, gender becomes salient for the male occupants, who may subject the·
women to remarks calculated to put them in their place by emphasizing their
deviant gender status. These may take the form of profanity, off-color jokes,
anecdotes about their own sexual prowess, gossip about the women's personal
lives, and unwarranted intimacy toward them." 111
To see how the social meaning of the sex in harassment changes when sexual
harassment is directed at women in traditional and nontraditional jobs, we
can simply compare the facts of the Supreme Court's first two sexual harass-
ment decisions. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 112 decided in 1986, presents
the classic sexual harassment scenario involving work roles that conform to
gender conventions. In the Vinson case, a bank teller complained that shortly
after she was hired (and while she was still on probation), her supervisor
invited her out to dinner, and then "suggested that they go to a motel to have
 Introduction ZI

sexual relations"; 113 after resisting, she capitulated. According to her com-
plaint, she then had sex with her supervisor some forty or fifty times in the next
several years, and on several occasions was raped by him. 114 The Court's next
harassment case, Harris v. Forklift Systems, 115 handed down in 1993, presents
the "new" sexual harassment scenario involving work roles that do not con-
form to gender conventions. Here the plaintiff worked as a manager of a
company that rented heavy equipment to construction companies. Hardy,
Forklift's president, harassed the plaintiff in terms that differ in important
particulars from the harassment at issue in Vinson. For example, Hardy con-
tinually made the plaintiff the target of comments such as: "You're a woman,
what do you know" and "We need a man as the rental manager," and at least
once, he told her she was "a dumb ass woman." 116 These comments were
interspersed with a variety of sexualized interactions. As the Supreme Court
relates: "In front of others, he suggested that the two of them 'go to the
Holiday Inn to negotiate [Harris' ] raise.' ... Hardy occasionally asked Harris
and other female employees to get coins from his front pants pocket.... He
threw ,objects on the ground in front of Harris and other women, and asked
them to pick the objects up .... He made sexual innuendos about Harris' and
other women's clothing." 117
In both Vinson and Harris employers ask their female employees to go to a
motel, but this "proposition" does not have the same meaning in the two
cases. It does not appear from the facts of the Harris case that the employer is
the slightest bit interested in consummating sexual relations with the plaintiff,
as an expression of "desire" or "power." Rather, the "proposition" he makes
reiterates his claim that "we need a man as the rental manager." Like the other
sexually demeaning performances that Hardy exacts of Harris and the other
women in his ·employ, Hardy's mock proposal is intended to humiliate, send-
ing the message that, by trying to fill a man's job, Harris has made herself
contemptible: a failure, both as a woman and as a man.
Sexual harassment in nontraditional job settings communicates anxiety
about male authority not as visible in harassment in traditional job settings.
The harasser- who may stand to harassee in the role of superior, coworker, or
subordinate- uses harassment as an informal way to exclude women he lacks
formal legal or institutional authority to fire. The woman has violated gen-
dered work spaces or roles, and, as the Harris facts illustrate, sexualized con-
duct aims to restore the gendered order of work by expressing all the ways a
woman invading male work space is out of her proper role and place.
As Vicki Schultz has recently emphasized, harassment in nontraditional job
settings can involve many kinds of conduct, much of it not typically character-
ized as sexual; she demonstrates that judges in some circuits have failed to
.2.2 Reva B. Siegel

recognize the ways that sexual harassment can enforce occupational segre-
gation, so have refused to analyze harassing conduct that is nonsexual in
nature-or have "disaggregated" sexual and nonsexual harassing conduct in
ways that obscure their interactive exclusionary dynamics. 118
But as this discussion should suggest, differences in the harassment dynamic
in traditional and nontraditional job settings can produce confusions about
the sexual elements of harassment as well. As the Harris case illustrates, ha-
rassment in nontraditional job settings is often accomplished by sexualized
conduct. (In fact, one study reports that women in male-dominated work
settings "were generally more likely than other women workers to report a
variety of different kinds of social-sexual behavior in their current jobs."}119
Because of the different dynamics of harassment in traditional and nontradi-
tional job settings, there may be confusion about the kind of injury the "sex"
in sexual harassment inflicts. Is the harm of sexual harassment sexual coer-
cion? Or occupational exclusion?
In the classic harassment scenario-the kind Catharine MacKinnon first
analyzed in the I970s- a woman is forced to participate in sexual relations
she does not want in order to keep her job; in these circumstances, sexual
coercion enforces a traditionally gendered form of subjection that is fraught
with the kinds of dignitary meanings and distributive consequences that
women have protested since the first critique of marriage as legalized prostitu-
tion in the decade before the Civil War.
This classic form of harassment continues to flourish. But, as Harris illus-
trates, alongside it, there are newer forms of harassment, in which econom-
ically leveraged sexual coercion does not play the same central role. In these
kinds of cases, men are· not using economic power to secure sexual access to
women they otherwise would not have; rather, in this new kind of harassment
case that arises as women enter nontraditional jobs, men use sexualized and
nonsexualized conduct to communicate to women their outsider status in the
workplace. In this new scenario, the harm of sexual harassment is not a tradi-
tional kind of sexual coercion but a new cousin of it. Harm occurs- not
through the traditional pathway in which the harassed woman lacks capacity
to refuse an unwanted sexual relationship,- but instead because the harasser
uses sexualized and nonsexualized conduct to construct the harassed woman
as an outsider in the workplace-de-authorized and denigrated, in her own
eyes and in the eyes of others. As Harris illustrates, the harm here involves
forms of gender-role policing,120 often accomplished through sexualized at-
tention of a denigrating or mocking sort, rather than classic forms of sexual
coercion.
Consider the facts of Harris again. When Harris' boss suggested that he
 Introduction 23

go with her to the Holiday Inn to discuss a raise, Harris was perfectly able
to say no; but the moment Hardy propositioned Harris (in front of her sub-
ordinates), he inflicted harm as directly as when he uttered the "nonsexual"
remarks he was in the habit of directing her way ("You're a woman, what
do you know?" "We need a man as the rental manager," "[You're] a dumb
ass woman"). The mock "proposition" here communicates to the plaintiff,
"You're a woman, what do you know?" "We need a man as the rental man-
ager," and "[You're] a dumb ass woman- but it interpellates gender by invok-
ing the sexual prerogative performed in Vinson and in countless scenes like it
for centuries prior. By invoking this social memory- in the form of the mock
proposition and the various commands to assume sexually compromising
positions-the president of Forklift seeks to assert ma~culine authority over
his "dumb ass woman" rental manager that she has challenged by her very
presence in a traditionally male occupation.
In Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, 121 a case involving "same sex"
sexual harassment, the Supreme Court acknowledged the existence of dif-
ferent scenarios or paradigms in sexual harassment case law. In Oncale, a
group of men on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico harassed a male
coworker, in ways Justice Scalia was too uncomfortable to discuss, but which,
according to the plaintiff, involved different forms of assaultive sexualized
conduct: not only threats to rape the plaintiff, but part- or mock-performances
of the act (holding the plaintiff down while placing their penises up against his
body, grabbing him in the shower and doing the equivalent, or more, with a
piece of soap). 122 The Court held that the plaintiff could sue his employer for
sexual harassment under Title VII so long as the plaintiff could show that the
conduct in question amounted to discrimination on the basis of sex. The
Court's discussion of the different ways that sexual harassment plaintiffs can
demonstrate sex discrimination provides a revealing account of the case law:

Courts and juries have found the inference of discrimination easy to draw in
most male-female sexual harassment situations, because the challenged con-
duct typically involves explicit or implicit proposals of sexual activity; it is
reasonable to assume those proposals would not have been made to someone
of the same sex. The same chain of inference would be available to a plaintiff
alleging same-sex harassment, if there were credible evidence that the ha-
rasser was homosexual. But harassing conduct need not be motivated by
s~xual desire to support an inference of discrimination on the basis of sex. A
trier of fact might reasonably find such discrimination, for example, if a
female victim is harassed in such sex-specific and derogatory terms by another
woman as to make it clear that the harasser is motivated by general hostility
to the presence of women in the workplace . ... Whatever evidentiary route
24 Reva B. Siegel

the plaintiff chooses to follow, he or she must always prove that the conduct at
issue was not merely tinged with offensive sexual connotations, but actually
constituted "discriminat[ion] ... because of sex." 123

This passage in Oncale acknowledges that there is a divide running through

the sexual harassment cases, a difference between "desire" and "hostility"
cases. There do seem to be different dynamics at work in the sexual harass-
ment cases, and recognizing some of these differences could well help clarify
why certain cases and not others should be actionable. But dividing the cases
into harassment that concerns "desire" and harassment that concerns "hos-
tility to women in the workplace" may obscure as much as it illuminates.
However we characterize the cases- and there is no reason to think that there
are only two paradigms to be found in them-it will not help to ground the
enterprise in an account that views the classic harassment scenario as a scene
of "desire."
As feminist commentators have been emphasizing since the marriage-as-
"legalized prostitution" arguments of the nineteenth century, heterosexual
"desire" has a political economy: a set of institutions, rules, and roles govern-
ing the exchange of sex and money that gives men power over women in
marriage and market both. It is only by considering the larger social order that
is the background condition for the "desire" expressed in classic sexual harass-
ment cases that we can begin to read the power dynamics expressed through
the sex, in either the classic or newer harassment scenarios. The sex in Vinson
is performed in gender-traditional roles and expresses the inequality in power
and status that sex coerced under those background conditions would. And,
when women take or challenge men's traditional roles at work, Harris illus-
trates how harassment tries to restore a gender-traditional order, with sex
summoning the "memory" of the gender-traditional scene, a scene in which
men's power over women is secure. With no appreciation of this connection,
the sex in Harris is merely offensive, as in, crude, a breach of good manners,
not a nice way to treat a lady. With an appreciation of this connection, the sex
in Harris becomes a particularly visceral way of reminding women of their
proper place in matters of work and sex- at the bottom, where gender con-
ventions of the traditional order would have them be.
·There is a risk, of course, in overemphasizing the genealogical connection
between the sex "scenes" in ~inson and Harris. The harassment cases quite
wonderfully illustrate how the sex in sexual harassment morphs in meaning as
gender bends at work. Constructing a set of rigid legal presumptions about the
meaning of sex in sexual harassment would entrench a set of understandings
that is quite literally contested, in every sense, in the harassment cases. At the
 Introduaion 25

same time, there is a danger in underreading the sex here, in ways that sever it
from its genealogical referents. Sex between men and women is part of the
semiotics of status betWeen men and women- surely as expressive as "You're
a woman, what do you know?" and "We need a man as the rental manager." H
sex has been taken up in the defense of gender-traditional work roles, as a
mechanism for enforcing the code that marks some work roles "male" and
others "female"- it would make little sense to ignore it because there was no
real risk of sexual coercion in the traditional-scenario sense.
Which brings us back to the "rape" scene in Oncale. Where, if at all, do we
find sexual harassment on these facts? The Court seems confident that there is
sexual harassment on these "same-sex" facts, if Oncale's harassers are gay.
Then, by the Court's logic, what Oncale's harassers are doing to him reflects
"desire" and, by reason of the harassers' orientation, would count as an act of
discrimination "on the basis of sex." H, however, Oncale's harassers are not
gay, then, by the Court's logic, it is unlikely that what they are doing is "dis-
crimination on the basis of sex" unless it reflects "hostility to women in the
workplace." The Court's aversion to contemplating the facts of this case and
considering how they might enact discrimination on the basis of sex (even as
the Oncale opinion insistently- and somewhat remarkably for a discrimina-
tion case-reminds us that sexual harassment doesn't arise in every act of
gender differentiation but instead requires context-attentive interpretation of
the facts) 124 suggests that the Court doesn't in fact see harassment on these
facts, unless the men harassing Oncale are gay.
But our reading of Harris reveals how sexualized conduct can parodically
"recall" the traditional gender order and mark certain work roles "male."
Suppose the men harassing Oncale are straight. The male-male harassment in
Oncale could well be assimilated to the male-female harassment in Harris.
On this view, Oncale's harassers would be deploying sexualized conduct to
gender-mark work roles, even though no woinen are on the scene-in some
important sense to ensure that no women ever appear on the scene. Oil plat-
forms in the Gulf of Mexico, just like construction-equipment rental com-
panies, are "male" space, and performing certain masculinities in the course of
performing one's work is apparently an important mechanism for keeping
them so.
Suppose, by contrast, the men harassing Oncale are gay. The hypotheti-
cal case the Court seems to thinks an easy case of "sex discrimination" in
Oncale- the case involving "credible evidence that the harasser was homo-
sexual"125 is one that we would have to think about much harder. On these
facts, involving an attempted rape, there would be no doubt whatsoever
in calling the conduct an actionable assault- but do we want to call it sex
26 Reva B. Siegel

discrimination? If we vary the facts some, and substitute a scene involving a

sexual overture or advance in the workplace rather than an attempted assault,
would we want to say that, as between persons of the same sex, the overture
presents the same harm as a classic heterosexual scenario? Would its meanings
be the same, along the axis of either sexual coercion or gender-role policing?
Can we make sense of same-sex relations by assimilating them to the hetero-
sexual model, or do same-sex relations have independent semantic structure?
Even if they might, how far is it possible to disaggregate gender and sexuality
in this way? And should we do so by dividing the social world along lines of
"orientation," or are there queer alternatives that would subvert these con-
structions of the sexual? .

Sexual Harassment Law: Future Directions

Sexual harassment is now unlawful under Title VII, yet remains a seem-
ingly unending source of controversy.
Americans who agree that harassment of the sort alleged in Vinson and
Harris is sex discrimination disagree about the reasons why this is so. As this
discussion demonstrates, disagreement about the normative basis of the pro-
hibition on sexual harassment in turn produces dispute about the range and
types of practices the prohibition constrains. Debate is not restricted to law-
yers, but can take heated form in workplaces, in the media, and on the streets.
Nor is it likely to abate any time soon. As we have seen, the practice of sexual
harassment is evolving, assuming new forms as groups formerly excluded
from positions of economic authority seek equal access to the workplace. At
the same time, the regulation of sexual harassment, and debates over it, imbue
workplace interactions with new significance. These macro and micro trans-
formations in the ecology of work change the meaning of particular overtures,
actions, and utterances.
Harassment continues to have enormous dignitary and distributive conse-
quences, but the practices through which it is accomplished may well vary,
across workplace settings and over time. In some settings, sexual invitations
continue to function in the political economy of heterosexuality as they long
have, as coercive threats. Yet sexual proposals in work relationships do not
always coerce. The speaker may lack supervisory authority over the addressee,
or may wear it in such a way as to assure the addressee that she is free to refuse
his attentions without adverse consequence. Such utterances and overtures
may nonetheless denigrate the addressee, deprive her of authority, exclude her,
or undermine her competence in the workplace. Or they may not. Employees
 Introduction 27

may experience a sexual invitation as harmless- an occasion of social discom-

fort, or instead of deep delight. In some workplace settings, sexualized atten-
tion may have little dignitary or distributive consequence, and nonsexualized
utterances and actions may play a more important part in gendering work
than the sexual interchanges that are most commonly understood to harass.
Americans debating the proper contours of sexual harassment law invoke
all these scenes, countering story with story, and harm with harm. Just as
discrimination "on the basis of sex" shifted in meaning during the 1970s and
198os as courts began to recognize harassment as discrimination, it continues
to evolve in our own day as advocates and critics of the sexual harassment
claim argue about how law can best secure liberty and equality in work,
education, and other arenas of civic importance.
The chapters in this volume engage this conversation from a variety of
vantage points. In Part I, Contexts, Andrea Dworkin, Guido Calabresi, Anne
Simon, Pamela Price, and Gerald Torres offer brief observations on the law's
role in regulating sexual harassment; some speak of their pioneering work in
litigating early cases; others reflect on the aspirations of this body of law as it
has matured. Thereafter the chapters address points of deep normative con-
flict in the law of sexual harassment today.
In Part II, Unwelcomeness, Carol Sanger, Louise Fitzgerald, Kathryn Abrams,
Jane Larson, and Robin West address the role of consent. Under current case
law, when will courts find that sexual relations to which a plaintiff has con-
sented are nonetheless harassing? In what ways must plaintiffs communicate
that sexual attention is unwelcome for the conduct to be actionable? Does
requiring a showing of unwelcomeness make sense where the harassment does
not take the form of sexual overtures? Or where the sexual overture itself is
openly denigrating? Can mutually desired sexual relations ever serve as the
basis of a harassment claim?
What kinds of same-sex sexual overtures ought law proscribe as sex dis-
crimination under Title VII? Is sexual or nonsexual denigration directed at
persons of same-sex orientation ever sex discrimination? In Part ill, Same-Sex
Harassment, William Eskridge, Katherine Franke, Janet Halley, Marc Spindel-
man, and Christopher Kendall debate such questions in ways that expose
profound disagreement about the relation of gender and sexuality, and the role
that law plays in regulating sexual relations. Is sexual interaction at work a
field of latent harm from which law can emancipate employees? Or is it a
valued form of performance or expression that law threatens to m·uzzle?
Even if we can agree about the kinds of conduct law should prohibit as
sexual harassment, there are still deep questions about the ways the state
28 Reva B. Siegel

should attempt to vindicate these commitments. Who should be sanctioned

for harassing conduct, and how? In Part IV, Accountability, Judith Resnik,
David Oppenheimer, Deborah Rhode, Ann Scales, Cass Sunstein, and Judy
Shih explore questions of institutional responsibility for sexual harassment in
both employment and education settings. Should liability vary with forms of
harassment, or with changes in institutional context? How ought consider-
ations of efficiency and justice shape the ways law endeavors to ·deter or
remedy harassment?
Part V, Speech, considers how, if at all, law ought take account of speech
values in the ways it defines and regulates sexual harassment. Frederick
Schauer, Dorothy Roberts, Robert Post, Kingsley Browne, Janine Benedet,
and Jack Balkin address the question. There has been remarkably little discus-
sion of how the First Amendment constrains antidiscrimination law, with
most attention devoted to the speech implications of harassment law itself.
What does this pattern-of attention and inattention-reveal about the un-
derlying structure of First Amendment doctrine? How does wrestling with the
question alter the way we understand speech or equality law? Should we
modify antidiscrimination law to vindicate speech values in the harassment
context? If not, why not?
Sexual harassment doctrine has inaugurated profound changes in the ways
we understand questions of gender justice, racial justice, and values of equality
more generally. In Part VI, Extensions, Sally Goldfarb, Adrienne Davis, Tanya
Hernandez, Lea VanderVelde, and Diane Rosenfeld trace the life of the sexual
harassment paradigm in a variety of contexts. How does harassment illumi-
nate the intersection of race and gender inequality? In what ways might the
sexual harassment paradigm provoke us to reconceive other relationships?
What new kinds of law reform might it prompt?
Part VII, Transnational Perspectives, considers sexual harassment law in
comparative perspective. Orit Kamir, Susanne Baer, Abigail Saguy, Yukiko
Tsunoda, Martha Nussbaum, and Christine Chinkin, respectively, analyze
sexual harassment law in Israel, German, France, Japan, India, and in inter-
national human rights law. As the harassment paradigm crosses borders, it
assumes new forms, simultaneously illuminating the features of other legal
cultures and our own.
An afterword by Catharine MacKinnon concludes the volume by assessing
the changes wrought by sexual harassment law in the past quarter century.
Anchoring her case in the national debates spanning the Thomas-Hill hearings
and the Clinton impeachment, MacKinnon charts the norms and practices this
body of law has transformed-as well as the entrenched understandings and
arrangements that it has yet to disturb.
 Introduction 29

Notes
I. Slave women were subject to sexual coercion by masters and overseers. See Eliz-
abeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the
Old South 49, 297-99, 325-26 (I988); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of
Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present 20, 28, 3 7-3 8
(I985); Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave: A True Story 24-25 (I991). For a discus-
sion of the literature on the sexual exploitation of slave women, see Catherine Clinton,
"Caught in the Web of the Big House: Women and Slavery," in The Web of Southern
Relations 19-35 (Walter Fraser, Jr., et al., eds. I985). For sources discussing the law
governing slave rape, see infra note I I.
2. On the sexual exploitation of African-American women working as domestic
servants in the South in the decades after emancipation, see Paula Giddings, When and
Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America 86-87 (1984);
Tera W. Hunter, To 1oy My Freedom: Southern Black Women'S Lives and Labors After
the Civil War 34, 106 (1997);jones, supra note I, at I 5o; Bettina Berch, '"The Sphinx in
the Household': A New Look at the History of Household Workers," I6 Review of
Radical Political Economics 105, II5-16 (1984). On the predicament of women in
domestic service generally, see Kerry Segrave, The Sexual Harassment of Women in the
Workplace, I6oo-I993· at 23-39 (1994) (analyzing sexual abuse of women working in
domestic service and comparing practices in United States and various European coun-
tries); see .also Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-
Century America 213-19 (1983) (discussing prevalence of sexual relations in domestic
service, focusing on seduction and abandonment); Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its
Voice: Placing Women in American History 57 (1979 ), quoted in Giddings, supra, at 48-
49 ("Victorian morality applied to the 'better class' only. It was taken for granted during
the period and well into the twentieth century that working-class women- and especially
Black women- were freely available for sexual use by upper-class males").
3· For an overview of factory working conditions in the United States and several
other nations in the period from .1800 to the mid-I9oos, see Segrave, supra note 2 at 40-
73; see also Mary Bularzik, "Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes," 12
Radical America, 25, 28-38 (1978). On clerical workers, see Ruth Rosen, The Lost
Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, I900-I9I8, at I52-55 (1982) (discussing pros-
titutes who report~d sexual harassment in previous employment as domestic or clerical
workers); Bularzik, supra, at 2 5; see also Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of
Wage Earning Women in the United States 102 (1982) (quoting report of the U.S. Com-
mission on Industrial Relations) ("'A good many girls in department stores have got to
give in to the demands ... of certain ... buyers, managers, and floor walkers ... if they
want to hold their positions'").
4· For sources discussing how sexual exploitation of slave women was rationalized as
an expression of the natural promiscuity of African-American women, see bell hooks,
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism 52 (1981) ("Whitewomenand white men
justified the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women by arguing that they were the
initiators of sexual relationships with men"); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman:
Female Slaves in the Plantation South 61 (1985); Regina Austin, "Sapphire Bound!"
1989 Wisconsin Law Review 539, 570 (1989) ("Jezebel was the wanton libidinous black
3o Reva B. Siegel

woman whose easy ways excused white men's abuse of their slaves as sexual 'partners'");
Peter Bardaglio, "Rape and the Law in the Old South: 'Calculated to Excite Indignation
in Every Heart,'" 6o Journal of Southern History 749, 757· On domestic servants, see
Dudden, supra note :z., at 217 ("Some .observers thought that prostitution recruited many
ex-servants because service was filled with 'low' women"); Segrave, supra note :z., at :z.6-
2 7 (discussing reputed promiscuity of servant girls).
5· See McLaurin, supra note I, at 81; accord Kristin Hoganson, "Garrisonian Aboli-
tionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 185o-I86o,'' 45 American Quarterly 558, 571-73
(I993) ("[T]he many images of slave women as victims of seduction and rape that perme-
ated abolitionist publications contradicted Southern images of the slave woman as Jeze-
bel"); see also Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the
Politics of the Body 83-I04 (1993) (analyzing account of sexual exploitation in Harriet
Jacobs's Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl).
6. See Dudden, supra note 2, at 2I3-I9.
7. Helen Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage- Workers, Their Trades and
Their Lives 234 (I 8 87 ), quoted in Lin Farley, Sexual Shakedown; The Sexual Harassment
of Women on the Job 39 (I978).
8. See, e.g., Campbell, supra note 7, at 22-29, 87, I3 5-56.
9· Upton Sinclair, The Jungle ( I96o) (1905 ).
Io. Id. at I09 (emphasis added}.
II. Masters who raped their female slaves were not held legally accountable. See
McLaurin, supra note I, at 93; Bardaglio, supra note 4, at 756-6o; Margaret A. Burn-
ham, "An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law," 5 Law and Inequality
Journal I 87, :z. I9-:Z.:Z. (I 987); A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., and Anne F. Jacobs, "The 'Law
Only as an Enemy': The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial
and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia," 70 North Carolina Law Review 969, I o 55-
58 (I 99 :z.) (describing thelegal impunity with which white men raped black women).
12. 2 Joel Prentiss Bishop, Commentaries on the Criminal Law 607-I 6 (5th ed. I 8 7:Z. ).
13. As one nineteenth-century treatise explained the "utmost resistance" requirement,
"Nature has given her hands and feet with which she can strike and kick, teeth to bite and
a voice to cry out-all these should be put in requisition in defense of her chastity"; the
treatise went on to explain that there should be "some marks of violence upon the person
of the alleged ravished woman, and her statement is greatly strengthened if the marks are
found to have been present and seen by others immediately after the commission of the
offense.'' Ira M. Moore, A Practical Treatise on Criminal Law and Procedure in Criminal
Cases Bef9re Justices ofthe Peace and in Courts of Record in the State of Illinois 299-30I
(1876), quoted in Lea VanderVelde, ''The Legal Ways of Seduction," 48 Stanford Law
Review 817, 8 56 (I996). For additional nineteenth-century commentary on the utmost
resistance requirement, see id. at 8 55-58.
I4. People v. Dohring, I4 N.Y. 374, 384 (I874) (emphasis added).
I 5. For instance, in Christian v. Virginia, 2 3 Grattan 9 54 (Va. I 873 ), a black man was
acquitted for attempted rape of a black woman, even though he had "laid hold of her,
pushing her down on a pile of lumber, choking her, and trying to pull up her cloths." Id. at
9 55. The court reasoned that the burden of proof varies from case to case, depending on
"the character and condition of the parties." I d. at 9 58. Even though such actions would
 Introduction 3I

have been a "shocking outrage toward a woman of virtuous sensibilities .•. how far it
affected the sensibilities of the prosecutrix does not appear," since the defendant's actions
might simply have been an attempt to "work upon her passions." Id. at 959· Racial bias
in rape cases persists today. See Elizabeth M. Iglesias, "Rape, Race, and Representation:
The Power of Discourse, Discourses of Power, and the Reconstruction of Heterosex-
uality,"49 Vanderbilt Law Review 869, 88o-86 (r996) (discussing studies in Gary D.
LaFree, Rape and Criminal Justice [r989], showing that conviction rates depend on the
victim's race as well as on the defendant's).
r6. See Bardaglio,supra note 4, at 756-57 (observing that, according to an inRuential
treatise on slave Ia w, "only the master could seek compensation in the courts because 'the
violation of the person of a female slave, carries with it no other punishment than the
damages which the master may recover for the trespass upon his property'") (quoting
Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of
America 99 [r858]).
r7. See VanderVelde, supra note r3, at 837-4r (r996) (quoting Chitty's r832. edition
of Blackstone as stating that "In no case whatever, unless she has had a promise of
marriage, can a woman herself obtain any reparation for the injury she has sustained
from the seducer of her virtue"). Where touching was sexual, the common law incorpo-
rated the assumptions of rape law, including presumptive consent; moreover, the com-
mon law resisted commodifying what it understood as a "moral" rather than "economic"
injury. On the understandings underlying the common law's failure to provide victims of
rape a private action for recovery, see VanderVelde, supra, at 842.-67. On the tort claim
available to fathers alleging loss of their daughters' services by reason of their seduction,
see id. at 867-9r. On the use of the tort to redress sexual injury inRicted on women
employed outside their own ho.usehold, see id. at 8 37 n.90 (noting that of 2.87 nineteenth-
century reported seduction cases studied, forty-six indicate that the seducer was either the
woman's employer or his son).
rS. See id. at 8 54-67 (analyzing tort of seduction as elaborated in nineteenth-century
treatises and case law); see also Lisa Granik, "Running in Hermeneutic Circles: Challeng-
ing/Embedding Social Hierarchies Through Litigation" r98-2.ro (J.S.D thesis, Yale Law
School, I997) (analyzing tort actions for indecent assault filed by women against their
employers from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century).
19. See Granik, supra note r8, at 2.05-2.08.
20. See VanderVelde, supra note 13, at 883-97 (charting the evolving meaning, and
legal elements, of the seduction action over the course of the nineteenth century).
2. r. Id. at 89 5. Even after statutory reforms nominally accorded women in some states
the right to sue for seduction, courts continued to reject their claims on the ground that a
woman's "consent" to intercourse defeated her seduction action. See M. B. W. Sinclair,
"Seduction and the Myth of the Ideal Woman," 5 Law and Inequality 33,51-52. (r987);
see also Thomas M. Cooley, The Elements of Torts 86 n.r (r89 5) (noting that a woman
could not recover if she was "equally guilty with the man"); Right of Seduced Female to
Maintain Action for Seduction, I2I American Law Reports 1487, 1487-92 (r939)
(citing statutory rape cases, where consent was a legal impossibility, as exceptions to a
general policy of disallowing women's seduction suits).
2.2. See VanderVelde, supra note 13, at 896.
 32 Reva B. Siegel

23. See Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-
Century America 5 I -6 3 (I 9 85); Ariela R. Du bier, "Wifely Behavior: A Legal History of
Acting Married," Ioo Columbia Law Review 9 57, 1002-1003 (2000) (comparing anti-
common law marriage statutes to anti-heartbalm legislation); Jane E. Larson, "'Women
Understand So Little, They Call My Good Nature "Deceit"': A Feminist Rethinking of
Seduction," 93 Columbia Law Reiliew 374, 393-40I (1993); Sinclair, supra note :z.I, at
72-98.
24. Hoganson, supra note 5, at 571.
25. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (L. Maria
Childed., I86I).
26. Hunter, supra note. 2, at 34 (protesting sexual assaults on women in domestic
service in year after war ended).
27. See Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism 2II-
I 2 (I 978) (describing petition drives for statute crirninalizing seduction in New York that

collected nearly 2o,ooo signatures in I 840, and another involving almost as many signa-
tures that same year in Ohio); Larry Whiteaker, Seduction, Prostitution, and Moral
Reform in New York, I830-I86o,at I42 (1997) (reporting that by 1841 Moral Reform
Society had foiWarded "some 40,000 petitions" to the state legislature seeking a law
criminalizing seduction); Larson, supra note 23, at 391.
28. Ameridan Female Moral Reform Society, Advocate of Moral Reform 4I (1844),
quoted· in Berg, supra note 27, at 2IO (1978).
29. See Reva B. Siegel, "Home as Work: The First Woman's Rights Claims Concerning
Wives' Household Labor, 185o-188o," 103 Yale Law Journal 1073, n21-22 (1994)
[hereinafter Siegel, "Home as Work"].
30. "Woman's Rights Convention in New York," Liberator, Dec. 5, 1856, at 196; see
also id. (reporting that Henry Blackwell asserted that "[h]alf the marriages [which] were
now contracted would not be, were women pecuniarily independent").
3 I. For accounts of the legalized prostitution argument; see Rosen, supra note 29, at
55-57; Siegel, "Home as Work," supra note 29, at n21-22 & n. 166; see also Reva B.
Siegel, "Reasoning from the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and
Questions of Equal Protection," 44 Stanford Law Review 261, 308-14 (1992) (describ-
ing claims about marriage as legalized prostitution in nineteenth-century debates about
abortion); jill Elaine Hasday, "Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape,"
88 California Law Review 1373, 1455 (describing claims about marriage as legalized
prostitution in nineteenth-century debates about marital rape}.
32. See Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence ofan Independent
Women's Movement in America, 1848-I869, at 145-47 (1978}; Segrave, supra note 2,
at29-30.
33.DuBois, supra note 32,at 146.
34· On pardon, see Segrave, supra note 2, at 30. On the location of the Vaughn case in
the postwar movement's advocacy agenda, see Pillsbury, "The Hester Vaughn Meeting at
· Cooper Institute," Revolution, Dec. 10, I 868, aq 61; see also Eliza beth Pleck, "Feminist
Responses to 'Crimes Against Women,' 1868-1896,'' 8 Signs 451 (1983).
3 5.Jane E. Larson," 'Even a Worm Will Turn at Last': Rape Reform in Late Nineteenth-
Century America," 9 Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 1 (1997).
 Introduction 33

3 6. See, e.g., id. at I 5. In her investigation of Alameda County, California, records of

statutory rape prosecutions from I9IO to I9:z.o, Mary Odem found a disproportionate
number of forcible assault cases involving male employers of domestic servants. See Mary
E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in
the United States, r885-I920, at 58-59 (I995).
37· See Bularzik, supra note 3, at 36.
3 8. See Segrave, supra note :z., at 5 :z.-6o (discussing instances where sexual harassment
became "one of the issues, or the major issue, that precipitated a strike"); Bularzik, supra
note 3, at 34-35 (observing that "sexual harassment was addressed in Life and Labor,
the publication of the National Women's Trade Union League").
39· See Granik, supra note I8, at 2.I3-:z.o.
40. Emma Goldman, The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism :z.o (Alix K.
Shulman, ed. I970) (emphasis added).
4I. See Farley, supra note 7, atxi-xiii (recounting first use ofterm in I974).
42.. 4 :z. U.S. C. § :z.oooe (:z.ooo). For an account of some of the other legalfora-notably
state unemployment insurance systems-in which advocates pressed the sexual harass-
ment claim during the I97os, see Farley, supra-note 7, at I2.5-33; Catharine A. Macl(in-
non, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination 77-SI
{I 979) [hereinafter MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment].
43· MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment, supra note 42..
44· See, e.g., Farley, supra note 7, at 49 ("Depression of female earning power rein-
forces the domestic division of labor, which in turn reinforces job segregation, which in its
own tqrn reinforces depressed female wages").
45· MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment, supra note 42., at I74-75 (emphasis added); see
also id. at 58 ("If women's sexuality is a means by which her access to economic rewards
is controlled, relations between the sexes in the process of production affect women's
position throughout the society, just as women's position throughout the society makes
her sexuality economically controllable").
46. Farley, supra note 7, at I4-I5.
47· Id. at I5-I6, I7.
48. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment, supra note 42., at I62..
49· Id. at I8.
50. See Reva B. Siegel, "Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law: How 'Color Blindness'
Discourse Disrupts and Rationalizes Social Stratification'," 88 California Law Review 77,
S:z.-83 (2.ooo), reprinted in Robert Post et al., Prejudicial Appearances {:z.ooi) [herein-
after "Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law"].
p. See Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist
Condition (I997l·
52.. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment, supra note 42., at I74 ("Sexual harassment of
working women is argued to be employment discrimination based on gender where
gender is defined as the social meaning of sexual biology").
53· Id. at 178.
54· Id. at I92..
55. As MacKinnon dryly remarked, "The central conceptual difficulty (which often
occurs as a difficulty of proof) arises because of the necessity to infer from a context, a
34 Reva B. Siegel

frequency distribution, a single event, or proximate 'circumstances that a given discrimi-

nation is sex-specific, without deep!}' investigating the concrete social meaning of gender
status." Id.
s6.See Cornev. Bausch and Lomb, 390 F. Supp. 161, 163 (D.Ariz. 1975) (supervisor's
conduct was "nothing more than a personal proclivity, peculiarity or mannerism"; super-
visor was "satisfying a personal urge" and "no employer policy [was] involved" nor was
the company "benefited in any way").
57· See Tomkins v. Public Service Electric & Gas Co., 422 F. Supp. 55.h 556 (D.N.J.
1976) ("Title Vll is "not intended to provide a federal tort remedy for what amounts to
physical attack motivated by sexual desire on the part of a supervisor and which hap-
pened to occur in a corporate corridor rather than a back alley.")
58. See Miller v. Bank of America, 418 F. Supp. 233, 236 (N.D. Cal. 1976) ("The
attraction of males to females and females to males is a natural sex phenomenon and it is
probable that this attraction plays at least a subtle part in most personnel decisions"); cf.
Corne v. Bausch and Lomb, 390 F. Supp. 161, 163-64 (D. Ariz. 1975) ("The only sure
way an employer could avoid [sexual harassment] charges would be to hire employees
who were asexual").
59. See infra notes 62-66 and accompanying text.
6o. See infra notes 67-100 and accompanying text.
61. See generally Siegel, "Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law," supra note 50 (ana-
lyzing this question with respect to the law of race discrimination).
62. Tomkins v. Public Service Electric & Gas Co., 422 F. Supp. 553 (D.N.J. 1976); see
also Corne v. Bausch and Lomb, 390 F. Supp. r61, 163 (D. Ariz. 1975) ("It would be
ludicrous to hold that the sort of activity involved here was contemplated by the Act
because to do so would mean that if the conduct complained of was directed equally to
males there would be no basis for suit").
63. 561 F.2d 983 (D.C. Cir. 1977).
64. I d. at 989-90 and n.49 (emphasis added).
65. I d. at 97 n.55 (emphasis added). See also Williams v. Saxbe, 413 F. Supp. 654,659
(D.D.C. 1976) (similar analysis, incorporating bisexual harasser exception; as basis for
finding that sexual harassment discriminates on the basis of sex).
66. For a. remarkably astute discussion of this turn in sex discrimination discourse from
the early days of sexual harassment law, see Kerri Weisel, Note, "Title Vll: Legal Protec-
tion Against Sexual Harassment," 53 Washington Law Review 12 3, r 34 (1977 ). And for
a provocative account of the lacunae in our sexual self-accountings that the figure of the
bisexual threatens to reveal, see Kenji Yoshino, "The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual
Erasure," 52 Stanford Law Review 353 (:z.ooo); id. at 432-58 (discussing bisexuality and
sexual harassment law).
67. Barnes v. Train, 13 F.E.P. Dec. 123 (D.D.C. 1974), 1974 WL 10628, *1 (D.D.C.)
("This is a controversy underpinned by the subtleties of an inharmonious personal rela-
tionship. Regardless of how inexcusable the conduct of plaintiff's supervisor might have
been, it does not evidence an arbitrary barrier to continued employment based on plain-
tiff's sex").
68. The federal government mounted this defense to sexual harassment charges leveled
 Introduction 35

against its employees in at least two cases in the early 1970s. See Barnes v. Costle, 561
F.2d 983,990 (D.C. Cir. 1977) (ground of discrimination 'not sex, but refusal "to furnish
sexual consideration"); Williams v. Sax be, 413 F. Supp. 654, 6 57 (D.D.C. 1976) ("since
the primary variable in the claimed class is willingness vel non to furnish sexual consid-
eration, rather than gender, the sex discrimination proscriptions of the Act are not
invoked").
69. Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484, 496-97 n.2o (1974); Gilbert v. General Electric
Co., 429 U.S. 125 (1976). Note that Gilbert was statutorily "overruled" by Congress
when it enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Amendment to Title VIT in 1978. See
Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pub. L. No. 95-5 55,92 Stat. 2076 (1978) (codified at 42
U.S.C. § 2oooe(k) (1994).
70. Geduldigv. Aiello, 417U.S. 484, 496-97n.2o (1974).See Gilbert, 429 U.S. at 135
(quoting this passage as a basis for holding that, under Title vn, employment policies that
discriminate on the basis of pregnancy do not discriminate on the basis of sex).
71. See 42 U.S.C. § 2oooe-2(e) (2ooo).
72. Gilbert v. General Electric Co., 429 U.S. !25 (1976); Nashville Gas Co. v. Satty,
434 U.S. 136 (1977)
73· Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., 400 U.S. 542 (1970) (holding that policy violates
Title VII).
74· Sprogis v. United Air Lines, 444 F.2d 1194 (7th Cir. 1971) (striking down policy
forbidding female, but not male, flight attendants to marry).
75· Willingham v. Macon Telegraph Publ'g. Co., 507 F.2d 1084 {5th Cir. 1975).
76. See, e.g., Lanigan v. Bartlett & Co. Grain, 466 F. Supp. 1388, 1391 (W.D. Mo.
1979) (applying "sex-plus" doctrine to uphold discharge of female employee who vio-
lated dress code by wearing a pantsuit) ("plaintiff's affection for pantsuits is not an
'immutable characteristic'"); cf. Devine v. Lonschein, 62.I F. Supp. 894, 897 (S.D.N.Y.
1985) ("At least until that dreadful day when unisex identity of dress and appearance
arrives, judicial officers ... are entitled to some latitude in differentiating between.male
and female attorneys, within the context of decorous professional behavior and ap-
pearance").
77· See, e.g., DeSantis v. Pacific Tel. & Tel. Co., 6o8 F.2d 327,331 (9th Cir. 1979) ("We
must again reject appellants' efforts to 'bootstrap' Title vn protection for homosexuals .
. . . [W]hether dealing with men or women the employer is using the same criterion: it will
not hire or promote a person who prefers sexual partners of the same sex. Thus this policy
does not involve different decisional criteria for the sexes").
78. Smith v. Liberty Mutual Ins. Co., 569 F.2.d 325 (5th Cir. 1978).
79· See Barnesv. Costle, 561 F.2.d 983,990 (D.C. Cir. 1977) (ground of discrimination
not sex, but refusal "to furnish sexual consideration"); Williams v. Saxbe, 413 F. Supp.
6 54, 657 (D.D.C. 1976) ("[S]ince the primary variable in the claimed class is willingness
vel non to furnish sexual consideration, rather than gender, the sex discrimination pro-
scriptions of the Act are not invoked").
So. See, e.g., Stroud v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 548 F.2d 356,1977 WL 25929, at ""2 (5th
Cir. 1977) (unpublished opinion) (holding that in an all-female pool, discriminating
against married women does not violate Title VII) ("[C]ertain women- stewardesses who
36 Reva B. Siegel

are unmarried- are favored over certain other women- stewardesses who are married.
As one of the all-female group of flight attendants employed by Delta, plaintiff suffered a
discrimination, but it was based on marriage and not sex"); Knott v. Missouri Pacific Rail-
road Co., 527 F.2d 1249, 1252 (8th Cir. 1975) (upholding different grooming standards
for men and women) ("While no hair length restriction is applicable to females, all em-
ployees must conform to certain standards of dress. Where, as here, such policies are rea-
sonable and are imposed in an evenhanded manner on all employees, slight differences in
the appearance requirements for males and females have only a negligible effect on em-
ployment opportunities"); Willingham v. Macon Tel. Publ'g Co., 507 F.2d 1084, I092
(1975) (upholding different grooming standards for men and women) ("This frame of
analysis removes Willingham's complaint completely from the Sec. 703 (a) 'sex-plus' cate-
gory, because both sexes are being screened with respect to a neutral fact, i.e., grooming in
accordance with generally accepted community standards of dress and appearance").
8I. Cf. Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484,496-97 n.2o (1974) ("The program divides
potential recipients into two groups- pregnant women and nonpregnant persons. While
the first group is exclusively female, the second includes members of both sexes").
82. Willingham v. Macon Tel. Pub/'g Co., 507 E2d 1084, 1090 (5th Cir. 1975) (en
bane).
83.Id.
84. See id. at 1092.
8s.Seeid. at1091-92.
86. See supra note 67 and accompanying text.
87. See, e.g., Williams v. Saxbe, 413 F. Supp. 654,657-61 (D.D.C. 1976) (distinguish-
ing pregnancy cases and "so-called 'hair cases''' and insisting that "[t]he requirement of
willingness to provide sexual consideration in this case is no different from the 'pre-
school age children' and 'no-marriage' rules" in cases where a sex-plus policy was held to
be sex discrimination in vioiation of statute).
88. See Barnes v. Costle, 561 F.2d 983, 993 (D.C. Cir. 1977).
89. Robinson played a key role in litigating Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), and
was part of the NAACP team that argued Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483
(1954). He also served as dean of Howard University Law School, where he and his
colleagues and students developed many of the central legal theories of the civil rights
movement. See Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion and Black Ameiica's Struggle for Equality_ 253-55,48 5-505, 667-69 (1976).
90. See id. at 984. A number of the early sexual harassment plaintiffs were African-
Am~rican women, some suing white male supervisors. See, e.g., Miller v. Bank of Amer-
ica, 418 F. Supp. 233 (N.D. CaL 1977) (black female clerk suing white male supervisor);
Munford v. James T. Barnes & Co., 441 F. Supp. 459 (E.D. Mich. 1977) (black female
assistant manager suing white male employer). Other early cases, like Barnes, involved
intraracial harassment. For discussions of several of the early cases and their racial dy-
namics, see MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment, supra note 42, at 61-62, 65-68; Elvia R.
Arriola," 'What's the Big Deal?' Women in the New York City Construction Industry and
Sexual Harassm~t Law, 1970-!98 s," 22 Columbia Human Rights Law ReviB;W 2.I., 4I-
42 (1990).
91. Barnes, 56I F.2d at 993-94 (footnotes omitted).
 Introduction 37

92. 454 E2d 234 (5th Cir. I97I ).

93· Barnes, 561 F.2d at 994 (quoting Rogers v. EEOC, 454 F.2d 234, 238 (5th Cir.
I97I)).
94· See, e.g., Weisel, supra note 66, at 129..;32.
95· See generally Mary Anne Case, "Disaggregating Gender from Sex and Sexual
Orientation: The Effeminate Man in the Law and Feminist Juris prudence," I o 5 Yale Law
Journal I (I995l· .
96. For an account of how sexual harassment was discussed in popular magazines
during the I970s (and the ways that account deviated from feminist criticisms of the
practice), see Arriola, supra note 90, at 44-47.
97• 347 U.S. 483 (I954).
98. For a summary of the per curiam Supreme Court opinions invalidating segregation
policies in noneducational contexts, see Derrick Bell, Race, Racism and American Law
II8-I9 (3d ed. 1992).
99· 388 U.S. I (I967).
Ioo. At present, the American judiciary is relying on a version of "race-plus" to argue
that the state can conduct searches using suspect descriptions containing race without
engaging in race-based state action of the ~ort that would trigger heightened scrutiny. See,
e.g., Brown v. City of Oneonta, 22I F. 3d 329,337-38 (2d Cir. 2ooo) ("This description
contained not only race, but also gender and age, as well as the possibility of a cut on the
hand. In acting on the description provided by the victim of the assault-a description
that included race as one of several elements-defendants did not engage in a suspect
racial classification that would draw strict scrutiny"). See generally, Richard Banks,
"Race-Based Suspect Selection and Colorblind Equal Protection Doctrine and Dis-
course," 8 U.C.L.A. Law Review I075, I095 (2oor) ("This sole factor/one-of-many-
factors distinction is undeniably prominent in many discussions of racial discrimination,
including the Supreme Court's recent redistricting decisions"). Courts exempt suspect
descriptions from strict scrutiny on the grounds that raoe is only one of several selection
criteria employed, hence the practice is said not to discriminate on the basis of race. But
there is no general equal-protection rule to this effect. Courts often apply strict scrutiny to
practices that employ race along with several other selection criteria; the classic case is
affirmative action.
IOI. Barnes, )6I F.2d at 99I n. 57·
I02. See Siegel, "Discrimination in the Eyes 6f the Law," supra note so, at 90-9I, 98-
I02 (discussing race discrimination case law).
I 03. These particulars are regulated through the remaining doctrinal criteria that define
the elementll of harassment.. For instance, EEOC guidelines provide that "Unwelcome
sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a
sexual nature constitute sexual harassment 'when (I) submission to such conduct is made
either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment, (2)
submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for
employment decisions affecting such individual, or (3) such conduct has the purpose or
effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating
an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment." 29 C.F.R. I6o4.II (1999).
The requirement that the plaintiff communicate to her harasser that his attentions were
38 Reva B. Siegel

"unwelcome" is one much-criticized definitional element. See, e.g., Susan Estrich, "Sex at
Work," 43 Stanford Law Review 8r3, 8rs-r6 (1991) (arguing that the law of sexual
harassment imports many of the "rules and prejudices" endemic in traditional rape law,
including a misplaced emphasis on the victim's conduct).
ro4. See Siegel, "Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law," supra note so, at 109-13
(analyzing how dynamic interaction of antidiscrimination rhetoric and status-enforcing
practices gave rise to dispute about whether civil rights law was best understood to
embody an "antidiscrimination" or an "antisubordination" principle).
ros. In a much relied upon study of sex segregation in employment, Andrea Beller
reports that occupational segregation from 1972 to 198r experienced "a rate of decline
almost three times as large as that during the 196os." See Andrea H. Beller, "Trends in
Occupational Segregation by Sex and Race, I960-198r," in Sex Segregation in the
Workplace r2 (Barbara F. Reskin ed., 1984). .
ro6. See Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos,]ob Ques, Gender Ques: Explaining
Women's Inroads into Male Occupations 3-90 (1990) (examining socioeconomic fac-
tors that might account for changing sex composition of occupations during 19705 and
r98os).
107. See id. at 64. The EEOC was at first extremely reluctant to enforce Title VII's
prohibition on sex discrimination. See Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Poli-
tics of Women's Issues, 1945-I968, at r87:-205 (r988). Under pressure from the Na-
tional Organization for Women (NOW), formed partly in response to the EEOC's foot-
dragging, the commission gradually became more responsive to feminist concerns. See
Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy,
I960-1972., at 205-32 (1990). By the early 1970s, enforcement of Title VII's sex dis-
crimination provision had become a more significant priority for the EEOC. See Reskin
and Roos, supra note w6 at 54-55 (describing sex discrimination litigation during the
1970s involving nontraditional job categories such as banking and insurance).
ro8. See Reskin and Roos, supra note ro6, at I7-I9 tbls. r.6, 1.7. While in many jobs,
such as managerial, administrative, and clerical work, there was a significant increase in
sex integration (see id. at 17), other occupations, such as construction and other tradi-
tionally male blue-collar work, remained overwhelmingly male, with women making up
only I or 2 percent of the field- percentages that remained static or dropped during the
period in question. See id. at 19. See also Barbara R. Bergmann, The Economic Emer-
gence of Women 70 (1986) (tables demonstrating that the percentage of women in the
Occupational Group of "Operators, fabricators, and laborers" rose only from 24 percent
in 1972 to 25 percent in 1985, whereas WOIIle.n_rose from 33 to 42 percent of the
"Managerial and professional specialty" workers over this same period).
109. Farley, supra note 7, at 90 (emphasis added).
I ro. Bergmann, supra note 108, at 106.
II r. Barbara E Reskin and Heidi I. Hartmann, eds., Women's Work, Men's Work: Sex
Segregationonthe]ob 53 (1986).
1!2. 477 u.s. 57 (1986).
II3. Id. at 6o.
II4. Id.
rrs. 510 u.s. 17 (1993)-
 Introduction 39

II6. It:/.. at 19.

II?· Id.
IIS. Vicki Schultz, "Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment," 107 Yale Law Journal
r683 (r998).
II 9· Barbara A. Gutek and Bruce Morasch, "Sex-Ratios, Sex-Role Spillover, and Sex-
ual Harassment of Women at Work," 38 Journal o{Sociallssues 55, 67 (r982.). ("For all
seven categories of social-sexual behavior assessed, women in nontraditional occupa-
tions and jobs reported more experiences of them on their current jobs than were re·
ported by working women in general or by women in sex-integrated work who also
interact predominantly with men." In this study, "3r.5 percent of the women in male-
dominated occupations and jobs reported being touched sexually compared to r 5 per·
cent of working women in general"). Gutek and Morasch observe that these results may
reflect the fact that these nontraditionally employed women actually did experience more
social-sexual behaviors than the average working woman. However, it may alsQ be an
indication of their awareness of such behavior." Id.
!2.0. See Katherine M. Franke, "What's Wrong with Sexual Harassment?" 49 Stanford
Law Review 69r (I997l· On Franke's account, "sexual harassment-between any two
people of whatever sex-is a form of sex discrimination when it reflects or perpetuates
gender stereotypes in the workplace." Id. at 696. Franke argues that sexual harassment
should be reconceptualized as "gender harassment." "Understood this way, sexual ha-
rassment is a kind of sex discrimination not because the conduct would not have been
undertaken if the victim had been a different sex, not because it is sexual, and not because
men do it to women, but precisely because it is a technology of sexism." /d.
I2.I. 52.3 U.S. 75 (I998).
r2.2.. See id. at 76-77.
r2.3. Id. at So (emphasis added).
I 2.4. See id. at Sr -8 2. ("The real social impact of workplace behavior often depends on
a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships which are
not fully captured by a simple recitation of the words used or the physical acts per·
formed"; judgments in sexual harassment cases require "[c]ommon sense, and an appro-
priate sensitivity to social context';).
r2.5. Id.