Sexual Harassment: A Feminist Phrase That Transformed the Workplace

• Author: Constance Backhouse
• Profession: Professor of law at the University of Ottawa
• Pages: 209-236

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209

chapter 8

SEXUAL HARASSMENT:

A FEMINIST PHRASE THAT

TRANSFORMED THE WORKPLACE1

Constance Backhouse2

A. INTRODUCTION

I stood at the spea ker’s podium and tentatively sur veyed my audience.

The room was packe d. The members of the audience seemed both t ense

and uncertain. It was 20 March 1981, and a crowd had assembled in Ot-

tawa’s city hall to li sten to the city’s rst workshop on the cont roversial

and novel topic: “sexual harassment of worki ng women.” I was the fea-

tured guest speaker, invited because I was a co-author of the rst book

published in Canada on the subject. Maude Barlow, who ran the oce

of equal opportunity for Ottawa’s socially progressive mayor Marian

Dewar, had been the one who approached me to ask if I would speak to

1 Constance Ba ckhouse, “Sexu al Harassment: A F eminist Ph rase That Trans-

formed the Workplace” (2012) 24:2 CJ WL 275. Reprinted w ith permiss ion

from Univers ity of Toronto Press www.utpjou rnals.com. Ar ticle © 2012 by

the Canadian Journal of Wome n and the Law. Copyright in t he content of the

article r emains wit h CJWL.

2 Constance Backhous e, CM, O Ont, FRSC, is a pr ofessor of law at the Univer-

sity of Ott awa.

The author would l ike to than k Beth Atcheson for sug gesting tha t she

document t he history of the e orts taken to el iminate se xual haras sment

over the past de cades. Without her urg ing, this na rrative might n ever have

been writ ten. The author als o wants to than k the women — Beth Atches on,

Beth Symes, D iana Majury, and L orraine Greaves — who ha ve worked with

her in the Fem inist Histor y Society to ch ronicle the his tory of the femin-

ist movement in C anada and Québe c through the publ ication of a series

of books. See Fem inist Hist ory Society, onli ne: Feminist Hi story Societ y

www.FeministHistories.ca.

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constance backhouse

the group. I had not met Maude bef ore, but her warm welcome reassure d

me greatly th at morning. She was wonderf ul — astute, char ismatic, and

inspiri ng. Over breakfast, she had f ully coached me on the gender pol-

itics of the event. Sexual harassment was a huge problem wit hin the

city’s workforce. Some of the women who would be seated in the audi-

ence had suered personally from unwanted sexual overtures. Among

the men would be some of the cit y’s most tenacious and ag rant perpe-

trators, who had been told that their attendance at the workshop was

mandator y. They would b e sitting in the front rows, a rms crossed in de-

ance, ready for a ght. T he feminists at city hal l wanted to transform

the cultu re. They hoped someone like me, perceived as a r adical outside

agitator, might be a ble to set the stage.

I remember joking w ith Maude, telling her that t hey needed a “mir-

acle worker.” It was a tall order. And it was at t hat precise moment that I

realized that these brave women i n Ottawa truly believe d that a speech

about sexual harassment could dismant le a piece of the sexist world

around them. I caught my breath as I recognized how much power we

understood to be wrapped up in this new idea of “sexual harassment.”

I looked around the room again, took a deep breath, and launched into

a speech I had given several hundred times across Canada and the

United States in t he past two years. An d as I did, in the back of my m ind,

I could not help but reect on what had brought me to this place and

this moment.

My life had been deeply enmeshed in the feminist campaign to

eradicate sex ual harassment since the s pring of 1978, when Leah Cohen

and I had begun full-time work on a book. The story of how that book

came to be published a ye ar later as The Secret Oppression: Sex ual Harass-

ment of Working Women, may oer one way of tryi ng to understand how

the idea of sexua l harassment came to hold s uch potency.3 My reections

are those of a sing le feminist, working w ithin a much wider and power-

ful movement. Ma ny feminists played pivotal roles in advancing the

campaign against sex ual harassment, and others would tell this story

dierently, and probably be tter. I oer these memories simply as the re-

counting of one path , one set of observations, a long a trajectory that w as

much broader tha n any one woman’s comprehension.

3 Constance Backhou se & Leah Cohen, The S ecret Oppression: Sexual H arass-

ment of Working Women (Toronto: Macmil lan, 1978) [Backhouse & Cohen].