The sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain are nothing new in either the political or business worlds. The sort of actions he’s accused of (and which the trade organization preferred to settle out of court) are sadly commonplace, and for many years women accepted this treatment as part of the cost of earning a living.
I was part of a small group of young women who fought back in 1971, only three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1968. There was no court battle. We didn’t get any money. We only sorta won. But at least we fought back.
By December, 1970. I had finished my required number of credit hours at Catholic University. I had been named a College Scholar, which meant instead of taking two semesters of am English seminar, I was permitted to write one very long paper. Since I’d done all the research the previous semester and could write at home as easily as in a dorm room, I chose to save my parents’ some money by living and working at home. Since I was applying for grad school, I wanted to earn some money for the next year. I got a part-time job at a local department store chain. Towards the end of that spring, I was transferred to the Budget Men’s department, where I met my supervisor, a man I’ll call Randall.
Randall was around 35, balding, and a little pudgy. He was fast-tracked for management, according to the rumor mill. And Randall made me very uncomfortable from the first day I worked there. He hovered a little too close. He leaned in a bit more than strictly necessary. He paid the young female clerks—all the clerks were in their late teens and early twenties and female—compliments that were just a little too effusive. I told myself he meant nothing by it, that he was just a friendly guy.
Until the day he decided he was going to show me the proper way to fold men’s shirts and straighten the shirt counter. One would have expected him to stand beside me and have me watch him. No. Not Randall. He came up behind me, leaned into me, and worked around me. I quickly realized just how much he was enjoying this when I felt an erection pressing against me. I tried to move away, but I was pinned in place by his body. I decided to ignore it. After all, we were in an open space where shoppers and the other clerks could see, so he really couldn’t do anything more. Eventually, Randall had to go help a customer, and I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to keep a safe distance away from him..
Then a few days later, I had to go back to the stock room to get more merchandise for a sale table. The stockroom was a long, narrow closet space with bins holding shirts, socks, underwear, etc. There was just room for two young women to pass each other if you didn’t mind a little bit of body contact. As I was gathering up an armload of underwear and socks, I noticed Randall come in. I decided to hurry up and get out of there.
Randall wasn’t having it. He was here to help, he informed me, and pressed me up against one of the bins. He told me I was trying to carry too much at one time, and relieved me of some of my burden—and his hands just happened to stroke my breasts in the process. I told him I was fine, and didn’t need any help and that I felt uncomfortable with him standing so close to me. He looked pissed. I ducked under his arm and scurried out.
I was mortified. Had I done something to give him the idea that I liked his attentions? I was just 21, and a naïve 21 at that, the product of catholic schools where we were taught that if a man was aroused, we likely at fault, that we had to dress modestly and behave properly at all times. I thought I hadn’t bought into that notion that a man’s erection was necessarily the result of anything I’d done—but on some level, I guess I had. I thought over how I dressed. I wasn’t wearing skintight pants or micro-minis or low-cut tops. That would have been inappropriate for the workplace, and, besides, even my shortest skirts were pretty darned modest.
Had I said anything that might have given him the wrong impression? I wasn’t very good at flirting (I got better later in life) even if I’d found him a Sexy Beast, which he wasn’t. Besides, he was my boss, and you just didn’t do that with a supervisor any more than you did with a college professor.
I couldn’t think of anything I’d done to encourage him, and I did my damnedest to stay as far away from him as possible, and only to go into the stockroom with another woman. But I still assumed I was the only victim.
Until one Saturday a week or so later, when three of us took our lunch break at the same time. After we’d ordered our lunches, one of the women asked if anyone had had trouble with Randall lately.
“What kind of trouble?” asked the second woman.
The first woman sighed heavily,. He’d trapped her in the stockroom again and she’d told him earlier that she didn’t like being groped. She was afraid that if she said anything stronger, he’d get her fired, but she was damned sick and tired of dealing with his roving hands.
I spoke up about my experiences, and the second woman described similar encounters. It was worse, we concluded, when we worked nights, when there was often only Randall and at most two clerks. It was my idea that we needed to talk to Personnel, that we shouldn’t have to put up with being groped and grabbed by our boss. We talked about it at length. The only thing that concerned us was that every single one of the salesclerks were white, and Randall was African American. We were afraid we’d look like racists trying to get him in trouble. This was 1971, remember, and the memories of lynchings of Black men for smiling at a white woman were very fresh. We didn’t want him fired. We just wanted him to stop being a jerk. But we finally concluded that he had crossed a line, and that any man behaving as he had deserved to
One of the women was a single Mom who needed the job to support herself. The other, like me, was a college student, and she needed the money to help pay her tuition. But made a collective pledge to go up on our breaks that afternoon and tell Personnel what was going one. When we’d thought he was just groping one of us, we’d put up with it, but now we realized it was his standard behavior, and we had had enough. When we went back after lunch, we took aside the evening shift people and confirmed that they’d had similar experiences.
One by one, we went to Personnel. One by one, we told them what was happening to us. Five women over a four hour period all told the same story, with slightly different details depending on where we’d had our way-too-close encounters with Randall. The next day we were transferred to different departments. A month later Randall was sent to another store. I heard later that he was promoted to floor manager.
Was it sexual harassment?
I think so. Here’s what the EEOC has to say about what constitutes sexual harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968:
Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.
Sexual harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including but not limited to the following:
• The victim as well as the harasser may be a woman or a man. The victim does not have to be of the opposite sex.
• The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, an agent of the employer, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
• The victim does not have to be the person harassed but could be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
• Unlawful sexual harassment may occur without economic injury to or discharge of the victim.
• The harasser's conduct must be unwelcome.
It is helpful for the victim to directly inform the harasser that the conduct is unwelcome and must stop.
http://www.eeoc.gov/...
According to EEOC guidelines there are two types of sexual harassment:
Generally speaking, the EEOC guidelines divide sexual harassment into two different types:
• QUID PRO QUO sexual harassment is the easiest kind of sexual harassment to understand. Quid pro quo is a Latin term that translates as "something for something," and quid pro quo sexual harassment is simply an employer or other person in a position of power demanding sexual favors in return for advancement or as the basis for some other employer decision. To establish a case of quid pro quo sexual harassment, individual employees must show that they were subjected to conduct of a sexual nature that was unwelcome, unsolicited, and not incited or instigated by the employee; that the conduct was based on their sex; and that the employees' reaction to the conduct was used as the basis for an employment decision involving compensation, privileges, or conditions of employment. An example of quid pro quo sexual harassment would be a boss demanding his employee to have sex with him in return for a promotion. Quid pro quo sexual harassment is the easiest kind of sexual harassment to prove, but it is also uncommon compared to the other type of sexual harassment.
• Hostile-environment sexual harassment is created in situations in which an employee is subject to unwelcome verbal or physical sexual behavior that is either extreme or widespread. There is no threat to employment in this kind of harassment, but the harassment causes the employee subject to it enough psychological strain as to alter the terms, conditions and privileges of employment. Hostile environment harassment includes such circumstances as hearing sexual jokes, seeing pornographic pictures, and receiving repeated invitations to go on dates. This type of sexual harassment LITIGATION currently is most seen by courts and is the kind most difficult to prove. Most recent Supreme Court and appeals court cases regarding sexual harassment have been hostile-environment cases.
http://www.enotes.com/...
My experience certainly wasn’t quite “quid pro quo”. Randall hadn’t threatened to fire me and I wasn’t trying for a promotion. But there was the definite knowledge that he could write up an evaluation that was less than flattering and result in my firing. I’d made it clear both times that I was uncomfortable with his behavior so he knew it was unwelcome after the first encounter at the shirt table. It certainly created a hostile work environment, however. Every single one of us dreaded the nights we worked alone with him, and we tried to avoid being in the stockroom when he was around. Certainly, Randall didn’t suffer any from our reporting of his unwelcome advances, so it would seem that the department store personnel people didn’t take it very seriously. If anything, they seemed to regarded us as troublemakers. I was transferred to the department directly across from Randall’s, which meant that for a solid month I had to endure nasty looks whenever he happened to see me.
I am sure that Randall didn’t regard his actions as sexual harassment. I am sure he thought of himself as a harmless flirt—you know, the you never get laid unless you ask kinda guy. I am sure he considered us tight-assed feminist bitches with no sense of humor, and probably man-hating lesbians at that. I doubt he recognized that in many states, including ours, groping and touching breasts and buttocks of an unwilling victim was a low-level form of sexual assault, and he could have gone to jail for it.
No one should have to put up with this in order to earn a living.
And before anyone raises the issue, the victim can be male as well as female, and the advances made by a woman to a man or by someone of the same gender. Sexual harassment can happen to anyone. All it takes is a boss or co-worker who doesn’t respect personal boundaries or regard his or her employees as there to gratify his every whim, including the sexual ones.
How do you differentiate sexual harassment from marginally offensive behavior that doesn’t cross the line? After all, some guys –and women—are more physically affectionate than others. Does a hug mean you’re a sexual harasser? Not likely, unless you continue to do it after the recipient tells you it’s unwelcome. How about asking someone fro a date? After all a lot of consensual sexual relationships start in the workplace. Again, it depends. If the person makes it clear they’re uninterested and you continue to ask them out, it could cross the line. What about blue language and off color jokes? What sorts of behavior does this include?
Many different kinds of conduct—verbal, visual or physical—that is of a sexual nature may be sexual harassment, if the behavior is unwelcome and if it is severe or pervasive. Here are some more examples:
Verbal or written: Comments about clothing, personal behavior, or a person’s body; sexual or sex-based jokes; requesting sexual favors or repeatedly asking a person out; sexual innuendoes; telling rumors about a person’s personal or sexual life; threatening a person
Physical: Assault; impeding or blocking movement; inappropriate touching of a person or a person’s clothing; kissing, hugging, patting, stroking
Nonverbal: Looking up and down a person’s body; derogatory gestures or facial expressions of a sexual nature; following a person
Visual: Posters, drawings, pictures, screensavers or emails of a sexual nature
http://www.equalrights.org/...
The key elements are the severity and the repetitive nature of the behavior. Things that are considered:
The conduct of the harasser must either be severe or it must be pervasive to be sexual harassment. A single incident is probably not sexual harassment unless it is severe. For example, a single incident of rape or attempted rape would probably be sexual harassment (it would also violate criminal laws).
Although a single unwanted request for a date or one sexually suggestive comment might offend you and/or be inappropriate, it may not be sexual harassment. However, a number of relatively minor separate incidents may add up to sexual harassment if the incidents affect your work environment. Some questions you can ask yourself to determine whether the conduct is pervasive are: How many times did the incidents occur? How long has the harassment been going on? How many other people were also sexually harassed?
That situation with Randall was my first encounter with sexual harassment. It wouldn’t be the last. And I heard a lot of similar stories from other women. My roommate in grad school had been the teaching assistant for her department head the previous year. While attending a required conference for faculty members, he asked her to dance and stuck his tongue in her ear. She politely requested he stop. She returned to her room and she had just gotten out of the shower when the phone rang. It was the man we christened Larry the Lecher, the department head, inviting her up to his room for a drink. She declined politely. She did her damnedest for the rest of the year never to be alone with him. Another faculty member was my advisor for a script I was writing as independent study. I’d gotten an A from him in the class I’d taken the previous semester. But one night he gave ma ride home and suggested we should have story conferences in a bar. Not wanting to alienate him, I told him I’d just gotten engaged to someone back home—no ring yet, we wanted to wait till I was back and we could make an official announcement. I got a B for the script. I couldn’t prove it, but I had a strong suspicion that I got a lower grade because I hadn’t been willing to cozy up to my 50 year old married professor.
The real problem with sexual harassment is that some men simply don’t understand what makes women uncomfortable in the workplace. They can grasp the obvious: groping and centerfolds from a magazine several rungs below –Hustler-as your screensaver are easy. But what about compliments? What about slightly bawdy jokes? I’ve always thought that a good rule of thumb is to think about how you’d feel if your daughter or your sister came home and repeated the lines to you? Would you be okay with it or would you consider it crossing a line? Maybe that’s the best way to think of it is simply to treat the women you work with as if they were your sister or daughter. Or to quote the title of a song from the wonderful old musical –How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying-, “A Secretary Is Not a Toy”.
As to Sharon Bialak’s story about her encounter with Herman Cain, if she is telling the truth, it’s a clear case of -quid pro quo- harassment. If she wanted his help to get another job, she was expected to put out. There also appears to be pattern of behavior with Herman Cain. While it is possible that the NRA settled the cases simply to avoid bad publicity, the fact that they settled twice looks a tad off to me. But until all the facts come out, I am withholding judgment, although I am more likely to believe her now that the women who wished to keep her identity secret has come forward. I wouldn’t be voting for Cain even if I were a Republican because of his positions on the issues. Still, I wouldn’t want to be alone in a room with the guy if I were an attractive young woman.