What to Do When You Don't Want to Call the Cops: Or a Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment

Does it really help women to think of sexual harassment primarily as a legal issue? High-profile sexual harassment suits, such as that of Paula Jones against President Clinton, are often life-changing events, with all parties coming away with careers, reputations, and lives profoundly affected. Women have long suffered on the job from sexual extortion, now called quid pro quo harassment, but today the controversy centers on "hostile environment" harassment. Every one has an opinion about it; managements spend more and more money training people not to do it; and still the suits strike like lightning-devastating and seemingly random. Women and men often feel polarized in the workplace by what they perceive to be general hostility couched in sexual terms. What to Do When You Don't Want to Call the Cops questions establishment assumptions that women are, by definition, passive victims who require government help. It sees instead a period of transition toward a more balanced population of women in the workplace, with accompanying disruptions that can be minimized by understanding. Joan Kennedy Taylor presents what we know about the workplace and interviews managers, labor experts, and workers in such male-dominated fields as construction, engineering, business, and medicine to shed light on the male group culture that exists without women. She illustrates expressive behaviors that may be objectionable but are not sexual harassment and proposes specific strategies by which these objectionable behaviors can be countered, including a new feminist approach in company training programs. Taylor examines traditional and nontraditional workplaces, and female on male as well as male on male harassment, in order to apply these strategies to the entire picture. Lively and anecdotal, Taylor's balanced, non-adversarial study fills an important gap by providing strategies for businesses and employees, as well as for those who find themselves the target of sexual harassment.

About the Author :
Joan Kennedy Taylor is the national coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, a founding member and present vice president of Feminists for Free Expression and author of Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered.

Review :
."..the souvenir of an unabashed and often triumphant erotic life, rediscovered after nearly two hundred years, the story of [Anne Lister's] desire- and of the comic, gallant ways in which she satisfied it-seems especially poignant...the passion women find together has always existed, and we have only now begun to uncover its remarkable, lyrical history. " -"The Women's Review of Books", "An interesting historical record, edited with great sensitivity . . . . [Lister] reveals her lesbian affairs with remarkable honesty, offering a rare insight into the mores of the time."-"Sunday Independent", "As a document of one woman's revolt against conventions and as a celebration of love between women, this is an uplifting book." -"The Independent", "These remarkable diaries, a veritable Roseta Stone of lesbian life in the early nineteenth century, tell the story of the life and loves of Anne Lister, a outwardly conventional upper-class Englishwoman, who, from adolescence onward, was involved in a succession of passionate affairs with other women. Composed in a secret cipher - a kiss is Lister's codeword for orgasm, as in Two kisses last night, one almost immediately after the other, before we went to sleep- and ably decoded by Helena Whitbread, who spent six years editing them, the diaries trace not only Lister's relationships, but her attempts at self-definition and her strikingly confident and guilt free outlook. Lister's account of her daily life and her sometimes snobbish, but always compelling and unflinching commentary about the failings and shortcomings of her friends and acquaintances only add to the book's readability. One may take delight in what is here: the souvenir of an unabashed and often triumphant erotic life