A Firebrand Flickers
Legal Affairs, March, 2006 by Deborah Dinner
NEARLY THREE DECADES AGO, Catharine A. MacKinnon, the firebrand lawyer and scholar, played a critical part in transforming sexual harassment from an intractable, widely accepted fact of working life into an illegal practice. By the mid- 1970s, second-wave feminists had begun to discuss and protest the unwanted sexual advances, demands, and hostility that women faced on the job.
Their technique was consciousness-raising: By sharing personal narratives in a group setting, women were able to recognize that their individual experiences had a common foundation and to develop agendas for change. At the time, however, no court recognized as a form of sex discrimination even outright requests for intercourse in exchange for employment. In 1974, MacKinnon, then pursuing graduate...
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