What Herman Cain’s fundraising bonanza says to women about sexual harassment

As the story of the sexual harassment allegations against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain broke, Cain had his best 24-hour fundraising stretch. What should women conclude from this? Is this just support for Cain, or yet another Republican attack on the hard-won rights women have gained in the last three decades?

Before the ground-breaking work of Catharine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination in the late 1970’s, the term “sexual harassment” did not even exist. In her work defining both the term and the legal arguments, MacKinnon argued that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. MacKinnon established that sexual harassment is sex discrimination because the harassing act reinforces the social inequality of women.

Money talks, people say. And this week, I believe, money being given to the Cain campaign was speaking very loudly to women and what it was saying is that sexual harassment against women in the workplace is no big deal. But these days we may need to go even further. The spike in financial support for Cain could not only be interpreted as a rejection of the historic gains women have made in terms of workplace discrimination, but also be seen as part of the wide-spread pattern in the United States today of the acceptance, even promotion, of inequality across the board.

Women continue to struggle for equality in the workplace, and they continue to struggle with the discrimination of sexual harassment. MacKinnon’s work was groundbreaking as it showed how sexually inappropriate behavior against women at work was a violation of the law. But sexual harassment against women has hardly stopped just because some women have been able to fight sexual harassment successfully. Sexual harassment happens far more frequently than it is reported, and acted upon. Most women tell me when they try to claim that sexual harassment is occurring, they are still dismissed as just women whining, or, as Rand Paul believes, just as women who “can’t take a joke.”

Sexual harassment happens in the church as well as in the secular workplace. A recent survey of 6,000 United Methodists found that despite significant strides that denomination has made in taking sexual harassment seriously, there are still very high levels of reported victimization. The article also notes “Half he people who make sexual misconduct complaints at the local church level say the pastor or laity in leadership routinely “trivialize” their concerns.”

The reason we don’t hear all the time about sexual harassment in the religious workplace is the same reason we don’t hear about it in the secular workplace. Concerns of those victimized are ‘trivialized.’ People who experience sexual harassment are afraid of being disbelieved and their allegations dismissed as “totally false.” In an employment context, women are afraid, and rightly so, of the power of those men whom they accuse of sexual harassment because by definition sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination and it occurs because women so often have less power in the workplace. Women are afraid if they complain they will be out the door in the next round of job cuts. Yes, that’s illegal too, but very few women can afford to get themselves a lawyer and fight it.

I remember one time when I was lecturing on sexual harassment in the ministry workplace in a seminary class. One young man was very dismissive of what I was saying; despite other women (and one man) in the class challenging this young man on his attitude, he persisted in disbelieving that such things could happen.

The next week he came back to class and raised his hand. He said, “I owe the class an apology. I had dinner at my Mother’s house on Sunday and I told her what a ridiculous lecture I had heard from Professor Thistlethwaite. My mother spent several hours telling me about all the workplace harassment she has had to put up with since my father died and she had to go to work to support us. I asked her why she had never complained and she said she feared she would be fired, and ‘besides,’ she said, ‘who would believe me? You didn’t.’”

Struggling against sexual harassment in the workplace has been hard for women for a long time. And now, instead of making gains in respecting women in the workplace, we seem to be going backwards as a nation; revelations that a candidate for president has been subject to sexual harassment allegations by two women and that his employer gave them financial payouts becomes a fund-raising bonanza.

But instead of thinking about Herman Cain and politics, think about your own family. Think about your mother, your sister, your daughter, and perhaps yourself and ask whether you think it’s a good idea for them (or you) not to be able to get justice when someone engages in inappropriate sexual advances, touching or sexual contact, suggestive jokes, and/or demeaning comments at work.

Sexual harassment of women in the workplace happens, and it’s no joke when it does.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  | Nov 2, 2011 2:37 PM