The history of sexual harassment in America dates back to slavery and domestic servitude in colonial times. There were no laws to protect victims and society blamed them for being promiscuous and not fending off their perpetrators. After the Civil War, there was the case in Pennsylvania of Hester Vaughn (1853-1907), a dairymaid and housekeeper who was fired for being pregnant with her boss’s child. Living in poverty, she was found with her dead infant and tried and convicted of infanticide. She was sentenced to death, but women’s rights advocates came to her defense and eventually the governor pardoned her. A case was made that gender and class restrictions made her a target for sexual coercion.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and groups like them, along with labor activists, lobbied to protect women from sexual harassment. These efforts lost some steam in the 1920s as women were expected to know how to deal with sexual harassment perpetrators or quit their jobs to escape it. 1964 saw the passage of Title VII, which prohibited sex discrimination in employment. It has helped to raise the public’s awareness. But the nomination hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (1948-), in which law professor Anita Hill (1956-) alleged sexual harassment by him, brought even more public attention to this issue. Although he was confirmed, it empowered more women to come forward and speak out. More recently, some view sexual harassment as an historical issue, while many who file suit feel they are being stereotyped as oversensitive.