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ABSTRACT
Oral history collections provide rich evidence for understanding sexual harassment in the era before that term applied to unwanted sexual advances in schools and workplaces. Close reading of both speech and silence about sexual harassment in oral histories also illuminates women’s historical reluctance to recall or make public their experiences of sexual violence. Drawing on a large dataset of digitized oral history collections, this essay maps women’s memories of, and responses to, sexual harassment from the late 1930s through the mid-1970s. Whether they minimized the problem or identified with it, the narrators who addressed sexual harassment typically emphasized women’s personal responsibility and the lack of institutional accountability. Their recollections also reveal a range of individual forms of resistance that women employed before feminists named or laws prohibited sexual harassment.
Acknowledgements
The Stanford Oral History Text Analysis Project has benefitted from a Digital Humanities Fellowship from The HistoryMakers (Chicago), and from Stanford University support through a School of Humanities and Sciences Cultivating Humanities Grant at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, student internships through the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and the Program in American Studies, and guidance from the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research. I am deeply grateful for the crucial collaboration of Dr. Natalie Marine-Street and the expertise of Dr. Katherine McDonough. For student research assistance with data preparation, I thank Anika Asthana, Preston Carlson, Yibing Du, Reagan Dunham, Nick Gardner, Jenny Hong, Cheng-Hau Kee, Jade Lintott, Julia Milani, Ben Ruland, Natalie Sada, Maddie Street, Hilary Sun, Camellia Ye, and Jessy Zhu. Feedback on drafts from Sharon Block, John D’Emilio, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Natalie Marine-Street, Elaine Tyler May, Susan Krieger, the Clayman Institute 2019-2020 Faculty Fellows, the members of the Stanford Gender History Workshop, and both the 2018-2019 Sexual Violence Research Group and the 2021-2022 Gender/Sexuality Workshop at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, as well as the anonymous readers for the journal, all enhanced this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Modjeska Monteith Simkins, interview by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, July 28, 1974, in Southern Women, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC (hereafter Southern Historical Collection, UNC).
2. Rose L., interview by Sam Redman, January 30, 2012, in Rosie the Riveter WWII American Homefront Project, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley at Berkeley, CA (hereafter Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library). Although narrators gave permission for scholars to use the interviews cited in this essay, many women did so before the era of digitization made interviews widely accessible. For this reason, I cite the first name and last initial unless the narrator is a public figure. On the ethics of digital oral history, see Sherna Berger Gluck, “Refocusing on Orality/Aurality in the Digital Age,” in Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement, ed. Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 42-43.
3. For studies citing public testimony about rape in slave narratives, congressional testimony, court records, and the press, see, for example, Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through a Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 45-74; Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010); and Stephen Robertson, Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). On African American women’s reluctance to speak publicly of rape, see Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20.
4. Sharon Block, “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765-1815,” Journal of American History 89, no. 3 (December 2002): 849-68.
5. On the debates over the recovery of repressed memories, see Janice Haaken, “The Recovery of Memory, Fantasy, and Desire: Feminist Approaches to Sexual Abuse and Psychic Trauma,” Signs 21, no. 4 (Summer, 1996): 1069-1094; and Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). The critique of delayed reporting after Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 Senate testimony about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh gave rise to hashtags such as #WhyIDidntReport.
6. I am grateful to the archivists at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; The HistoryMakers, Chicago; Oklahoma State University at Stillwater; the Pembroke Center, Brown University; Rutgers University; the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; Smith College; Stanford University; and the University of North Carolina for contributing digital files of interviews. A separate article in progress details OHTAP methods and addresses the challenges of large-scale textual analysis of oral history transcripts.
7. For historical examples, see Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Mary Bularzik, “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes,” Radical America (Sept 1978): 24-43; Daniel E. Bender, “‘Too Much of a Distasteful Masculinity’: Historicizing Sexual Harassment in the Garment Sweatshop and Factory,” Journal of Women’s History 15:4 (2005): 91-116; Freedman, Redefining Rape, 109-201; Mara Keire, “Shouting Abuse, Harmless Jolly, and Promiscuous Flattery: Considering the Contours of Sexual Harassment at Macy’s Department Store, 1910-1915,” Labor 19:1: 52-73; Christopher Phelps, “Class: A Useful Category of Analysis in the History of Sexual Harassment,” Labor 19:1: 140-64; and Kerry Segrave, The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace, 1600 to 1993 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Co, 1994). On changing sexual standards, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. chaps. 12-14.
8. Lin Farley, Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978); Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), and “The Logic of Experience: Reflections on the Development of Sexual Harassment Law,” Georgetown Law Journal 90, no. 3 (March 2002): 813-834; Carrie N. Baker, The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27-48; Laura W. Stein, Sexual Harassment in America: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). Legally, sexual harassment is a civil offense related to discrimination, typically charged against an institution for failure to address complaints adequately; rape is one of a range of sexually related criminal offensives charged against individuals. See also Reva B. Siegel, “Introduction: A Short History of Sexual Harassment,” in Directions in Sexual Harassment Law, ed. Catharine A. MacKinnon and Reva B. Siegel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1-40; and Anita Hill, Believing: Our Thirty Year Journey to End Sexual Violence (New York: Viking, 2021), esp. 24-30. Key cases include Barnes v. Costle, 561 F2d 983, 989 (D.C. Cir. 1977); Alexander v. Yale 459 F. Supp. 1 (D. Conn. 1977); Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson 477 U.S. 57 (1986); and Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, 503 S. Ct. 60 (1992).
9. On women’s oral history, see Sherna Berger Gluck, “Women’s Oral History, the Second Decade,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 7, no. 1 (1983): 1–2; and Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991). For a rare project that focused on sexual violence, see Theresa de Langis, “Speaking Private Memory to Public Power: Oral History and Breaking the Silence on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence during the Khmer Rouge Genocide,” in Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2018), 155-69.
10. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 94-123. On personal testimony, see Alexander Freund, “‘Confessing Animals’: Toward a Longue Durée History of the Oral History Interview,” Oral History Review 41, no. 1 (2014): 2; and Suzanne Diamond, Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011). On the politics of speaking out about sexual violence, see Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (January 1, 1993): 260–90; and Tanya Serisier, Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
11. Joyce R., interview by Derria Monique Byrd, March 22, 1995, in Pembroke Center Oral History Project, Brown University at Providence, RI (hereafter Pembroke Center); Kristie M., interview by Jesse Marmon, May 29, 2006, in Pembroke Center.
12. On oral history as a coconstruction of interviewer and narrator, see Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); and Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). On the gender of interviewers, see Dana C. Jack and Kathryn Anderson, “Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analyses,” in Women’s Words, ed. Gluck and Patai, 11-26.
13. Betty S., interview by David Dunham, April 17, 2014, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library; Marilyn P., interview by Sam Redman, April 19, 2011, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library; and Edythe E., interview by Sam Redman, January 24, 2011. The term hanky-panky could refer to consensual, though illicit, sexual relations at work, or to coercive ones. On men interviewing female subjects, see Alistair Thomson, “Moving Stories, Women’s Lives: Sharing Authority in Oral History,” Oral History 39, no. 2 (2011): 73-82.
14. Under 10 percent of questions that elicited any sexual violence accounts included the term harass; 422 distinct references coded as sexual harassment appeared in 148 of the 2405 interviews (5 percent of Black and 6.5 percent of white women’s interviews). For narrators born before 1930, 5 percent of white and 4 percent of Black women’s interviews addressed sexual harassment; for those born after 1930, 8 percent of white and 5 percent of Black women’s interviews contained them.
15. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 53; Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria, September 25, 2006, 215–33; and Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds., Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). On the distinction between “silence” and “reticence,” see Lenore Layman, “Reticence in Oral History Interviews,” Oral History Review 36, no. 2 (2009): 218. On betrayal theory, see Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell, Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013); and Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Even those who do speak of violence can be unreliable narrators, depending on interview dynamics and the subject’s level of trauma and recovery.
16. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 50. On historicizing the language of experience, see Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991), esp. 779-80, 795.
17. Rose L. interview, Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
18. Barbara K., interview by Kurt Piehler and Donovan Bezer, March 3, 1998, in Rutgers Oral History Archives, Rutgers University at New Brunswick, NJ (hereafter Rutgers Oral History).
19. Bette C., interview by Racine Tucker Hamilton, June 14, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, Chicago, IL (hereafter HistoryMakers). The current analysis did not include nonsexual gender discrimination in the category of sexual harassment.
20. Marie S., interview by Tanya Finchum and Jason A. Higgins, June 27, 2014, in Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project, Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State University at Stillwater, OK (hereafter Spotlighting Oklahoma, OSU).
21. Betty S., interview by David Dunham, April 17, 2014, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
22. Peggy C., interview by Robin Li, February 16, 2012, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
23. Joyce F., interview by Susan J. Ferber, December 1, 1992, in Pembroke Center.
24. Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 140-141.
25. Pearl D., interview by Shaun Illingworth, January 30, 2012, in Rutgers Oral History.
26. Roberta T., interview by David Dunham, December 30, 2011, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
27. Lois B., interview by Juliet Smith, March 27, 1990, in Pembroke Center.
28. Martha B., interview by Joey Ann Fink, May 13, 2011, in The Long Civil Rights Movement: The Women's Movement in the South, Southern Historical Collection, UNC (hereafter Women's Movement in the South, UNC). One woman recalled a sheriff stating that women could protect themselves from violence if they would “stop dressing like sluts”; Lorayne L., interview by Joey Ann Fink, May 11, 2011, Women's Movement in the South, UNC.
29. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 42-51.
30. Charlotte M., interview by Dorsey Baker, November 10, 1985, in Pembroke Center. Cf: “Faculty never sexually harassed me in any way. I didn’t have people jumping on me.” Joanne M., interview by Tracy Allison, May 28, 2015, in Stanford Historical Society Faculty and Staff and Miscellaneous Interviews, Stanford Historical Society, Stanford University at Stanford, CA (hereafter Faculty and Staff, SHS, Stanford University).
31. Charlotte M., interview by Dorsey Baker, November 10, 1985, in Pembroke Center. For evidence of unreported sexual harassment of early women students at Yale, see Anne Gardiner Perkins, Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2019), 104-106.
32. See Freyd and Birrell, Blind to Betrayal, esp. chap. 10, on the way disclosure changes personal understandings of past events.
33. Sarah D., interview by Laurie Pantell, January 3, 2015, in Faculty and Staff, SHS, Stanford University.
34. Marlene F., interview by Joyce Follett, August 14, 2007, Smith College Voices of Feminism, Young Library, Smith College at Northampton, MA.
35. Joyce R., in Pembroke Center; Wanda S., interview by Jennifer Donnally, May 10, 2010, in Women’s Movement in the South, UNC.
36. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, chaps. 13-14.
37. Nanette G., interview by Natalie Marine-Street, September 29, 2018, in Stanford Historical Society Alumni Interviews, Stanford Historical Society, Stanford University at Palo Alto, CA (hereafter Alumni, SHS, Stanford University).
38. Margery L., interview by Julie Corman, April 3, 1982, in Pembroke Center; Nancy C.-A., interview by Juliana Nykolaiszyn, in Inductees of the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Oral History Project, Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State University at Stillwater, OK (hereafter Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame, OSU.)
39. Elaine J., interview by Julieanna Richardson, November 30, 2006, HistoryMakers. She recalled comments to white women that “you’re taking up a place a man could be in.” See also Sharon Pratt, interview by Cheryl Butler, July 26, 2007, HistoryMakers.
40. Margery S., interview by Jennifer Donnally, March 8, 2007, in The Long Civil Rights Movement: Gender and Sexuality, Southern Historical Collection, UNC.
41. Sharon Pratt, interview by Cheryl Butler, July 26, 2007, HistoryMakers. Pratt’s graduating class included one Black man and six white women.
42. Ntozake Shange, interview by Larry Crowe, September 12, 2016, HistoryMakers.
43. Alice A., interview by Eve Snyder and G. Kurt Piehler, March 14, 1997, in Rutgers Oral History. Ellipses in transcript, indicating a pause before “harassment.”
44. Pleasant H., interview by Marcia Greenlee, November 7, 1979, in Black Women Oral History Collection, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University at Cambridge, MA.
45. Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” 914-915.
46. Vera S., interview by Robert Hayden, June 24, 2005, HistoryMakers.
47. Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), chaps. 5-6.
48. Dorothy M., interview by Tanya Finchum and Alex Bishop, March 18, 2015, in Oklahoma One Hundred Year Life Collection, Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State University at Stillwater, OK (hereafter Oklahoma One Hundred Year Life, OSU).
49. Rose L. interview, Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library; Helen A., interview by Sam Redman, February 21, 2011, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
50. Maggie G., interview by Leah McGarrigle, Robin Li, and Katheryn Stine, April 9, 2003, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
51. Josephine W., interview by Sam Redmond, February 19, 2011, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
52. Alison P., interview by Karen Lamoree, June 14, 1988, in Pembroke Center. That some countercultural women abandoned bras in the 1960s may have prompted his question.
53. Barbara C., interview by Larry Crowe, February 7, 2012, HistoryMakers.
54. Felicia M., interview by Larry Crowe, April 3, 2003, HistoryMakers.
55. Karen S., interview by Larry Crowe, July 28, 2014, HistoryMakers. On the Foreign Service, see Alison Palmer, Diplomat and Priest: One Woman’s Challenge to State and Church (North Charleston, NC: Create Space Publishing, 2015), chap. 9.
56. The phrase evoked striptease, as popularized in a 1960s television commercial for men’s shaving cream using the soundtrack of “The Stripper”; Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 170.
57. Lucy S., interview by Michela Rodriguez, in Faculty and Staff, SHS, Stanford University.
58. Patricia B., interview by Kathryn Stine, February 12, 2003, in Rosie the Riveter, Bancroft Library.
59. Shirley M., interview by Julieanna Richardson, August 24, 2013, HistoryMakers.
60. Kay M., interview by Juliana Nykolaiszyn, July 18, 2007, in Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame, OSU.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Estelle B. Freedman
Estelle B. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in US History, Emerit, at Stanford University and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her ten books on the histories of women’s reform, sexuality, and feminism include No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine Books, 2002), Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press, 2013), and (with John D’Emilio) Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (University of Chicago Press, 3d ed., 2012). She currently codirects the Stanford Oral History Text Analysis Project and is codirecting a documentary film that evolved from her oral history with folk singer and activist Faith Petric (1915-2013). E-mail: [email protected].