The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism

Tasha Oren, Andrea Press, Tasha Oren, Andrea Press

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317542636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminism as a method, a movement, a critique, and an identity has been the subject of debates, contestations and revisions in recent years, yet contemporary global developments and political upheavals have again refocused feminism's collective force. What is feminism now? How do scholars and activists employ contemporary feminism? What feminist traditions endure? Which are no longer relevant in addressing contemporary global conditions?

In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars reflect on how contemporary feminism has shaped their thinking and their field as they interrogate its uses, limits, and reinventions. Organized as a set of questions over definition, everyday life, critical intervention, and political activism, the Handbook takes on a broad set of issues and points of view to consider what feminism is today and what current forces shape its future development. It also includes an extended conversation among major feminist thinkers about the future of feminist scholarship and activism.

The scholars gathered here address a wide variety of topics and contexts: activism from post-Soviet collectives to the Arab spring, to the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment, feminist art, film and digital culture, education, technology, policy, sexual practices and gender identity. Indispensable for scholars undergraduate and postgraduate students in women, gender, and sexuality, the collection offers a multidimensional picture of the diversity and utility of feminist thought in an age of multiple uncertainties.

Section IV
Ways of contesting

16
Women organized against sexual harassment

Protesting sexual violence on campus, then and now

Linda Blum and Ethel Mickey

Introduction

In late 1978 a group of undergraduate and graduate women at the University of California, Berkeley organized to protest sexual harassment on campus and press for action on multiple complaints against a faculty member. At the time, Title IX was relatively new, few people had heard of the term “sexual harassment,” and even fewer were likely to understand it as a form of sex discrimination or denial of equal educational opportunities for women. The university in 1978, needless to say, had no formal grievance procedure or reporting mechanism to handle such cases. The group – naming itself Women Organized Against Sexual Harassment or WOASH – engaged in intense activity over a two-year period to protest and work to establish such a procedure. Fast-forward to 2014, and a group of women students on the same campus had filed a civil lawsuit against the administration for failing to properly respond to their complaints of sexual assault as a violation of Title IX and their similar rights to equal educational opportunities (Golgowski 2015). Struck by the parallels between these two episodes separated by over 30 years, we have revisited the history of the original group to better understand the local politics of sexual harassment and the linkages between past and present instances of grassroots feminism on campus. Revisiting the history of WOASH also furthers understanding of the complex, decentered character of second-wave feminism.

The role of grassroots campus groups is an important yet often neglected aspect of the fight against sexual harassment. Such local efforts, by targeting a routine expression of male privilege, contributed much to making sexual harassment a widely recognized term. The major focus, however, of those studying such feminist politics has been on the macro level of national and cross-national arenas. Major studies, most notably those by Abigail Saguy comparing France and the United States (2003) and Kathrin Zippel comparing Germany, the United States, and the European Union (2006), carefully acknowledge the significance of local actors; but they necessarily leave such grassroots activism unexamined while taking on macro-contrasts in national institutional structures and cultural frames. Most other studies of sexual harassment in the United States have focused on the workplace and violations of Title VII – prohibiting employment discrimination – rather than on the campus activism and politics of Title IX. Such studies, for example, gauge the prevalence of harassment across types of occupations and organizations (Gruber 1992; Morgan and Gruber 2011; Welsh, Dawson, and Nierobisz 2002), its relation to actual work requirements in the service sector (Williams 1998), and the turn to diversity training amid fears of organizational liability (Dobbin and Kelly 2007; Kelly and Dobbin 1998).¹ We argue, in contrast, that a closer look at one local Title IX movement from the era of second-wave activism sheds important light on current feminist organizing and campus politics. For as we will discuss, in a sense everything yet nothing has changed.

Background

Under the Obama administration, a movement of young women students against sexual assault took shape at campuses nationwide; such young women assisted each other through Skype, Twitter, and Facebook groups to file complaints of violations of Title IX with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, with over 100 universities and colleges coming under investigation (Kingkade 2015). Although sexual harassment and sexual assault may appear to be separate issues, with sexual harassment less serious than sexual assault, sexual harassment is an umbrella term that includes more and less severe forms of unwanted sexual attention or “the involuntary eroticization of working [or educational] relationships” (Zippel 2006, x). Most researchers agree that such actions exist on a continuum of gender-based violence from unwanted sexual remarks, touching, demands or threats for sexual favors, to actual physical or sexual assault.² The ubiquity of less severe forms of sexual harassment, feminist scholars agree, normalizes more serious forms of violence against women such as sexual assault (Bayard de Volo and Hall 2015; O’Toole, Schiffman, and Edwards 2007; Quina 1990; Wise and Stanley 1987). Indeed, sexual harassment has been described as the “dripping tap” of sexual violence – a constant reminder of the status of women in gendered institutions and the masculine, heteronormative cultures in which they are embedded (Wise and Stanley 1987). Previous literature, moreover, suggests that victims of sexual harassment, even if survivors of its less severe forms, experience similar physical, psychological, and economic consequences to those experiencing other forms of trauma (O’Toole, Schiffman, and Edwards 2007). Sexual harassment and sexual assault on campuses sustain an environment hostile to women and illustrate the persisting weakness in enforcement of Title IX.

WOASH was specifically formed in 1978 when some 30 Berkeley women students came together to demand action on six complaints brought against a faculty member in the sociology department.³ The group’s primary goal was to establish a grievance procedure for handling student complaints of sexual harassment, but the group aimed its outreach efforts to the wider campus community and women employees as well, and pressed the university to take a strong public stance against it.⁴ Importantly, after WOASH began its efforts to raise awareness, the number of signed confidential complaints against the professor in question, Elbaki Hermassi, rose to 13. WOASH members knew the problem to be pervasive, at Berkeley and elsewhere,⁵ and were inspired by the students suing Yale University; in 1977, the Yale students’ was the first lawsuit to allege sexual harassment constituted a violation of Title IX. WOASH members spoke jointly with Yale plaintiff Pamela Price in a 1979 press conference: “it was the example of Pamela Price and those Yale students who supported her which convinced us to form Women Organized Against Sexual Harassment.”⁶

WOASH initially attempted to work with faculty and campus administration to address the complaints against Professor Hermassi. When the university took little action after three months of negotiation, WOASH filed a complaint with the federal government’s Office of Civil Rights (at that time, part of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare or HEW). In its two years of intense activism surrounding the filing of the Title IX complaint, WOASH members negotiated with campus administration and university attorneys face-to-face and in formal correspondence; held demonstrations and press conferences; drafted and circulated leaflets, pamphlets, newsletters, and petitions; held a campus-wide informational forum and supported complainants while fighting to protect their confidentiality; consulted with sympathetic legal counsel; and researched and debated appropriate grievance mechanisms. In the fall of 1980 Professor Elbaki Hermassi chose to resign, but the fight for appropriate procedures and enforcement of Title IX continued.⁷

Methods

The first author (Blum) was a member of WOASH while a graduate student at Berkeley. Another WOASH member and frequent spokesperson, Ruth Milkman, had saved the group’s documentation, eventually creating a (partial) electronic version shared among a small number attending a reunion in 2014, and later donating the entire collection to the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Blum’s participation in WOASH provided us with insider information, and her retrospective observations and memories, with communication with additional former members, served to fill the gaps in the archives and to answer lingering questions. The other author (Mickey) was a graduate student whose research has focused on gendered organizations. Mickey, as the outside author, provided distance from WOASH to conceptualize the group more broadly within the gendered history of higher education and feminist activism. Our insider-outsider coauthorship served as a check, minimizing bias and encouraging clarification in our interpretation of the archival data (for more, Blum and Mickey 2018; also see Bayard de Volo and Hall 2015).

The archive itself includes documents such as meeting records, newsletters, press packets, media coverage, correspondence with Berkeley administration, petitions, research on other cases, and internal communication among WOASH members. The two authors first engaged extensively with the archives separately and then came together to engage in dialogue over the data, together drawing out conceptual themes and questions. We then analyzed our observations in relation to the literature on the history and politics of sexual harassment, reflecting also on the comparison to current efforts to end campus sexual assault.

Gendered organizations – everything and nothing has changed

Feminist theory has largely taken a structural approach to sexual harassment, examining how the distribution of power and the division of labor in organizations facilitate men’s power and women’s subordination. Rather than defining sexual harassment as an individual behavior problem among a few deviant men, a gendered organization approach points to features of modern hierarchical organizations that serve to disadvantage women (Acker 1990; Britton 2000; Kanter 1977; Williams 1998). Organizational power in particular tends to facilitate sexual harassment, and women, who tend to be segregated into gender-typed jobs low in status, authority, and pay, often experience harassment by their male superiors or other powerful men (O’Toole, Schiffman, and Edwards 2007). Moreover, when heterosexual display or sexual exploitation become part of the job description, as common in many forms of interactive service work, sexual harassment itself becomes institutionalized (Williams 1998). Women workers with more privilege who are overly visible in male-dominated organizations may also adopt sexualized survival strategies – and these can reproduce the gendered, symbolic boundaries within organizations and invite sexual harassment (Blair-Loy 2001).

Sexual harassment of employees in work organizations drew the attention of policymakers and feminist researchers prior to sexual harassment on campuses being recognized as a pervasive problem. Law and policy rarely recognize the gendered organization perspective, however, and treat discrimination in employment separately from discrimination in education – with sexual harassment in the workplace considered a form of sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act rather than, as in education, under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments (with each relegated to their own federal regulatory agencies). Yet members of WOASH, following the Yale case, relied on the legal and intellectual frameworks established by Catharine MacKinnon (1979)⁸ and Lin Farley (1978), which focused primarily on workplace sexual harassment. Title VII is relevant to sexual harassment on campus, nonetheless, because colleges and universities are major employers of women and women students. WOASH also made less distinction between women workers and students, drawing frequent parallels in terms of gendered power relations and including women university staff in its outreach efforts. Additionally, many, if not most, WOASH members worked on campus as instructors, teaching and research assistants, or in work-study positions, so the line between student and employee was often blurred.

The demography of higher education has shifted significantly since the 1970s, another gain from second-wave feminism and Title IX. By the start of recent third-wave activism, women had caught up or surpassed men in numbers of students, faculty, and administrators. When WOASH formed in 1978, the number of women earning degrees had markedly increased in the few short years since passage of Title IX – but women still earned less than half of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees conferred in the US and only 25% of doctoral degrees (see Tables 16.1a and 16.1b). By contrast, in 2013 women earned approximately 60% of bachelor’s and master’s degrees and over 50% of doctoral degrees (NCES 2015).⁹ Yet despite such visible gains, higher education remains a gendered institution resting on the traditionally masculine values of hierarchy, challenge, competition (ostensibly) by individual merit, and independence. Women entering these formerly homosocial spaces tend to experience exclusion and hostility as they threaten male solidarity and privilege (Bystydzienski and Bird 2006; Page, Bailey, and van Delinder 2009; Valian 1998; Yoder 1991). Women students and faculty continue to experience patterns of isolation, inequitable shares of resources, biased evaluation and reward procedures, and incompatibility of work-family arrangements. Moreover, women’s clustering in lower, untenured ranks has implications for the politics of sexual harassment: when a campus does acknowledge the problem, it is typically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Contemporary feminism: editors’ introduction
• SECTION I Ways of being
• SECTION II Ways of living
• SECTION III Ways in
• SECTION IV Ways of contesting
• SECTION V Coda conversation
• Index