In Sexual Harassment, Joan Kennedy Taylor questions establishment assumptions that women are, by definition, passive victims who require government help. She not only summarizes present law and policies but illustrates various non-governmental methods of countering expressive behavior that is offensive but not truly harassing, including a new feminist approach to company training programs.

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.

At a time when some feminist critics are saying that the feminist movement has been too individualistic and too market oriented, Joan Kennedy Taylor contends that feminists should cherish and celebrate their tradition of individualism and equal rights. Reclaiming the Mainstream points out that the most enduring voices in the women's movement--the voices that each successive generation of feminists rediscovers with a shock of recognition--Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman--have spoken out against government privileges and special protection for women so that their individual differences might flourish. This book argues that modern feminism grew out of the nineteenth-century Woman Movement, which, like much late nineteenth-century thinking, became a battleground between individualist and collectivist ideas. When individualist ideals predominated in this movement--ideals of independence, social mobility, even sexual freedom--it gained wide adherence. But when the movement supported collectivist ideas of social reform, it became more marginal and sectarian. It was a focus on the individual woman's rights and happiness that reinvented feminist movements twice in our history, in the decades from 1910 to the New Deal, and then again in the late 1960s. The book examines this history, gives an overview of the contemporary scene, and analyzes the campaign to pass and ratify an equal rights amendment--and its failure. Reclaiming the Mainstream also discusses contemporary policy issues that affect women: affirmative action and comparable worth; rape, battering, sexual harassment, and incest; the many facets of sexual and reproductive choice; and theattempts to unify feminist and nonfeminist women against pornography or in support of social feminist issues. On all these topics, Taylor offers a new and surprising individualist feminist analysis that asks feminists to make their philosophy more consistent--and more effective. She calls attention to the continuing voices within the feminist tradition that encourage women to reclaim their strength, their faith in their own abilities, and the community feeling of the seventies to find nongovernmental solutions to the problems women still face in managing work, family life, and relationships.