Today I Learned: The Phrase 'Sexual Harassment' Was Made Popular at Cornell in the '70s

Cornell University, an Ivy League school in New York, has recently made the headlines for an alleged rape committed on campus in 2024. A civil lawsuit was filed by an unnamed female student ("Jane Doe") against the university and seven students, known as Cornell 7, alleging that she was drugged and gang-raped by the group and that Cornell failed to protect her or punish the perpetrators.

It's the worst kind of sexual harassment, ironically a phrase that was made popular right there at Cornell University in the '70s.

In the fall of 1974, journalist and feminist activist Lin Farley was hired by Cornell as a lecturer for a field study course called Women and Work. Cornell, it turned out, was the first university in the U.S. to offer an accredited course in women's studies. Farley would later find out that the university wasn't only a hotbed for feminist thoughts, but also a hotbed of cases where women "had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behavior of men." This pattern came from a consciousness-raising session, which she had to do with students and colleagues amid the scarcity of analytical literature in the field-study course she was facilitating. "The male behavior eventually required a name, and sexual harassment seemed to come about as close to symbolizing the problem as the language would permit," she added in a 1978 book that documented her findings, Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job.

Carmita Wood, an administrative assistant, accused her supervisor, celebrated physicist and Director of Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Sciences, Boyce McDaniel, of kissing and groping her without consent. This took a toll on her physical and mental health, forcing her to quit after working at the university for eight years. The mother of four struggled to find another job and was denied unemployment benefits because she supposedly left work of her own accord. She appealed the decision, but was denied.

Wood found support among a group of women working at Cornell's Human Affairs Program, who organized themselves to fight this maltreatment of female workers. They formed Working Women United (WWU), published a newsletter named Labor Pains, and distributed the "first questionnaire ever devoted solely to this topic."

On May 4, 1975, WWU mounted a public speak-out, where around 300 women attended and shared their testimonies of workplace intimidation and abuse. The issue (and the term) was brought to national attention when Farley testified before the New York City Human Rights Commission Hearings on Women and Work, defining sexual harassment as "unwanted sexual advances against women employees by male supervisors, bosses, foremen or managers." The New York Times covered it, publishing the headline: Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work in August of 1975. "Sexual harassment of women in their place of employment is extremely widespread. It is literally epidemic," Farley was quoted. More working women from across the nation sent their experiences. It was the first time that the two words were used, heard, and read outside an academic setting and beyond feminist circles.

Technically, the first documented use of the term "sexual harassment" was in a 1973 study about sexism and gender discrimination in the workplace, by Mary Rowe, Ph.D. At the time, she was the Special Assistant to the President and Chancellor for Women and Work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researched power play in interpersonal negotiations, and her work informed MIT's first harassment policy.

It was the compounded work of these women, from the university to the national consciousness, that not only identified menacing actions of men in the workplace, but also recognized and acknowledged that it was (and still is) happening.

But like many legal battles surrounding women's issues, Wood still did not get her benefits nor win initial legal damages, though she was eventually placed in another department. McDaniel faced no formal investigations and administrative discipline due to the lack of legal framework prohibiting sexual harassment at the time. He was even elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981.

Five decades later, Cornell finds itself facing familiar allegations—that it failed, once again, to protect one of its own. Or, more accurately, failing to protect its women while protecting the men.

REFERENCES:

Blakemore, Erin. "Until 1975, ‘Sexual Harassment’ Was the Menace With No Name." History Channel, 8 Jan. 2018.

Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job. Warner Books, 1980. Originally published in 1978.

Garcia-Navarro, Lulu. "The Woman Who Popularized The Term 'Sexual Harassment'." NPR, 5 Nov. 2017.

Nemy, Enid. "Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work." The New York Times, 19 Aug. 1975.

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