Abstract
Archival records and key informant interviews show how feminist coalitions first defined sexual harassment as unlawful discrimination in education. their story demonstrates how ordinary citizens have the power to change not only laws but also how those laws are interpreted.
Title IX extended protections to women and girls in education and has since become one of the most prominent tools for confronting sexual harassment—including sexual assault—on college campuses.
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How do we envision new social worlds—and work toward building them? American law holds both imaginative and practical capacity, and enormous power for social change. The story of Title IX’s transformation to encompass sexual harassment reveals one way to unlock the law’s potential. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is the U.S. civil rights law that bars schools from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” It emerged as the direct result of second-wave feminist mobilization, explicitly building on the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in employment, housing, voting, and public schools, among other social contexts. Title IX extended these protections to women and girls in education and has since become one of the most prominent tools for confronting sexual harassment on college campuses.
Title IX’s significance lies less in its literal provisions than in what it illustrates about how we can transform society by mobilizing existing laws to address social problems. Lawmakers did not design Title IX to confront sexual harassment. In fact, the term “sexual harassment” did not even exist when the law was passed. We now understand sexual harassment as unwanted behavior of a sexual nature—from suggestive jokes to physical violence—particularly when someone in a position of power directs this behavior toward someone with less power. In 1972, however, this type of behavior had no name, much less recognition as a civil rights violation. No one understood sexual harassment as a problem schools ought to address. University officials dismissed the few incidents that came to their attention as trivial, personal matters, or as universal and natural experiences of coeducational environments. In schools and countless other contexts, women simply endured sexual harassment as a part of everyday life.
Title IX’s significance lies less in its literal provisions than in what it illustrates about how we can transform society by mobilizing existing laws to address social problems.
College life today looks different. To be sure, sexual harassment still plagues contemporary campuses: In the 2019 Association of American Universities (AAU) Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct, undergraduate women and gender minorities reported the highest levels of sexual harassment across different groups of students, at 31 percent and 46 percent, respectively. However, in contrast to previous generations, we widely recognize such harassment as unacceptable—and as a form of illegal sex discrimination under Title IX. We now have policies prohibiting sexual harassment and processes for addressing it as a civil rights issue. While these response systems certainly have flaws—indeed, they still require significant changes to better serve students without also exacerbating the kind of bureaucratic bloat that jeopardizes academic freedom—their existence gives students a means to address complaints without involving lawyers, federal officials, or the police. Reframing sexual harassment in education as an unlawful use of power ushered in this new world, one in which women became more equally human.
In my 2025 book, Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX, I explain how this world first came into view and how coalitions of feminists repurposed Title IX to fight sexual harassment. Drawing on historical case studies linking feminists at Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that women claiming protection under Title IX transformed both the law itself and gender dynamics on college campuses. The law’s extremely broad core provision—“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”—helped students dream of a future in which women could pursue their educations free of unwanted advances from male faculty. They arrived at and worked toward this vision in collaboration with feminist lawyers. Interactions between feminist networks spanning distinct domains—education and law—produced the idea that sexual harassment constitutes unlawful sex discrimination in education. Moreover, these coalitions offered opportunities to deploy the idea, which in turn allowed it to reshape these two domains and how they fit together.
To be sure, the power of law to effect social change has limits. There is a wealth of social scientific research—including, for example, Lauren B. Edelman’s 2016 book Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Compliance—documenting how antidiscrimination law has failed to remediate inequality and, at times, even reinforced it. But this does not mean we should abandon law as a tool for social change altogether. Instead, we must persist in our work to give meaning to the words that govern us, so they can better serve our needs and fulfill their promise of a more emancipatory society. This essay provides a glimpse into the remarkable story of the women who did this important work with Title IX, focusing primarily on the events at Yale, where a new vision for law, higher education, and campus culture first emerged.
discovering “sexual harassment”
During the 1960s and 1970s, America seemed on the verge of revolution, especially on college campuses. Building on the momentum, tactics, and legislative victories of the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, college campuses in the late 1960s became hotbeds of radical organizing around a wide range of issues and saw increasing solidarity among marginalized groups. Students protested the Vietnam War and fought for Black Power, free speech, and women’s and gay liberation, among many other causes.
In 1974, against this backdrop of intense social and political upheaval, feminists at Cornell coined the term “sexual harassment” to describe women’s experiences in the workplace. Lin Farley, a former reporter at the Associated Press and organizer for women’s liberation in New York City, had recently joined the Industrial and Labor Relations School as an instructor, teaching an undergraduate course on “Women and Work.” In one of the first class meetings, Farley held a consciousness-raising session where she asked students to share stories about their employment. “There was an unmistakable pattern . . .” Farley recalled in her book, Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job (1978), “Something I had never seen although I had observed it many times was newly exposed. . . . The male behavior eventually required a name, and sexual harassment seemed to come about as close to symbolizing the problem as the language would permit.” Together, these women developed a common language that would enable women all over the world to connect around their common experiences.
Reframing sexual harassment in education as an unlawful use of power ushered in a new world, one in which women became more equally human.
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With two of her new colleagues, Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigné, Farley deliberately worked to build these connections, including by providing direct aid to local women like Carmita Wood, who had recently quit her job at Cornell’s Nuclear Studies Laboratory because of “a pattern of sexual harassment” by Professor Boyce McDaniel, a Manhattan Project physicist. Seeking advice on how to secure unemployment benefits for Wood, in 1975, the Cornell women sent a letter, addressed “Dear Sisters,” to feminists across the country describing her situation. This was the first time “sexual harassment” appeared publicly in print, helping seed a global movement and related changes in American laws, including Title IX. Mobilization against sexual harassment in the workplace, especially at Cornell, therefore laid the foundation for organizing against the problem in education.
documenting sexual harassment on campus
Among the many women who first encountered the term “sexual harassment” through the “Dear Sisters” letter was Catharine A. MacKinnon. MacKinnon would become a renowned feminist legal scholar, writing works including Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), which translated understandings of sexual harassment from the women’s movement into antidiscrimination discourse and helped persuade the American judiciary that sexual harassment constitutes sex discrimination in the workplace. But when she received the letter from the Cornell women, she was still a graduate student at Yale, teaching courses on “Political Theory and Contemporary Feminism” and “Socialism and/or Feminism.” In class, MacKinnon shared her developing ideas about sexual harassment, exposing students to the concept. One student, Ann Olivarius—who was already involved in feminist organizing on campus, having cofounded the Undergraduate Women’s Caucus—expressed interest in exploring the idea’s implications for education. Up to this point, feminists had primarily used “sexual harassment” to make sense of women’s workplace experiences. Applying the concept to faculty misconduct marked the beginning of Title IX’s transformation.
In 1976, Olivarius conducted a survey of undergraduates’ “perceptions of women at Yale,” which unearthed numerous accounts of faculty members sexually harassing students. The Undergraduate Women’s Caucus later reported these incidents to the Yale Corporation (i.e., the Board of Trustees) but did not yet frame this misconduct as a violation of Title IX. That connection would come later, when Olivarius and other students joined in coalition with lawyers. The report concluded with a concise statement of what the caucus hoped to achieve: an expanded bureaucracy for addressing sex discrimination on campus.
The Yale Corporation directed Olivarius to the university secretary, Henry “Sam” Chauncey, to develop a response to the problems the report raised, especially the allegations of faculty-student sexual harassment. Chauncey had been deeply involved in coeducation at the college—which had happened very recently, in 1969—suggesting his receptiveness to gender equity issues on campus. But Chauncey was befuddled by this specific issue. Sexual harassment was a newly named social problem that the law had yet to recognize as discrimination. In the absence of proscriptions against sexual harassment, school officials struggled to address it, pushing students to look elsewhere for solutions.
developing a new interpretation of title ix
In the face of these challenges, Olivarius sought counsel from the legal expert she knew best at the time: Catharine MacKinnon, who, in addition to working toward her PhD in political science, was also pursuing her JD. MacKinnon introduced Olivarius to lawyers at the New Haven Law Collective, a feminist law firm she cofounded in 1976 with Anne Simon, among other Yale Law School graduates. Both the lawyers and the Yale students jumped on the opportunity, and a feminist coalition was born.
The idea to use Title IX emerged as these two networks puzzled out the problem together. Through Olivarius, the lawyers met other Yale women and learned about their experiences of sexual harassment on campus. These conversations revealed that university administrators had failed to adequately respond to complaints, leaving victims without redress. In the lawyers’ view, then, the school had violated these students’ right to equal educational opportunity. The problem disproportionately affected women and required institutional-level remedies. As the students and lawyers reviewed potentially relevant case law and administrative regulations, they discovered that Title IX required all federally funded schools to have a grievance process for addressing alleged violations. “And that was like, ding, ding, ding,” Simon recalled. “It was exactly what they [the students] were saying. It was exactly what they wanted.” Together, the students and lawyers reframed sexual harassment as both a personal issue and a broader social problem.
A key question remained, however: Did these students’ experiences constitute sex discrimination? The coalition turned to MacKinnon’s developing theory of sexual harassment as unlawful sex discrimination in employment. Simon recalled the group reading a draft of Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) and deciding they were covered. When I interviewed MacKinnon, she claimed that using Title IX was her own idea but also recognized that its development relied on her interactions with students: “If it hadn’t been for her [Olivarius], it wouldn’t have happened. . . . [T]he penny dropped for me when she said what she said about students being sexually harassed by faculty. That was why I conceived it as sex discrimination under Title IX because of those facts, and she was the source of them.” Olivarius similarly recalled collaboration as key to the process that generated this legal innovation: “[I]f Anne Simon hadn’t been there to say, ‘Hmm, maybe we can make a legal case out of it’ and then . . . I did the research to prove it was a problem [at Yale] . . . I don’t think the origins of the case came from her [MacKinnon] any more or less than it did from the rest of us.” The coalition allowed the students and lawyers to combine their resources in a new way, creating a new interpretation of the law rooted in a more equitable and just vision of women’s place in higher education.
transforming title ix
This domain-spanning collaboration between students and lawyers also produced new opportunities to take concrete steps toward this imagined future and to put their new interpretation of Title IX into action. They decided to sue Yale for allegedly violating the law by failing to provide an outlet for sexual harassment complaints—but first, they needed plaintiffs. Olivarius agreed to join, as did two other undergraduate women and a male faculty member. But there was a sense that the case needed a stronger rallying point. Ronni Alexander would fill that role.
When Alexander first met Simon and MacKinnon in 1977, she shared that the school’s band director, Keith Brion, had forced her to have sex with him during her private flute lessons. Alexander vividly remembered the conversation: “That was the first time that I’d ever told anyone the story of what had happened. And it was also the first time they [Simon and MacKinnon] said that—they told me that I had been raped. And it was the first time for me to think about it in that light. [I]t’s like women are supposed to protect themselves, whatever happens, and if you don’t, you’re the bad one.” Simon and MacKinnon helped Alexander understand her experience as an extreme expression of gendered power. Without Alexander’s “huge courage,” Olivarius later recalled, “we would never have had a case. You know, we’d be waiting still for the next—for the first case people could rally around and say, ‘Oh, you’ve shown us the way.’”
On July 6, 1977, the New Haven Law Collective filed suit against the school in Alexander et al. v. Yale. Yale’s lawyers moved to dismiss the case, arguing that Title IX did not apply to sexual harassment. While awaiting the district court’s decision, two more undergraduate women joined the roster of plaintiffs. One was Pamela Price, a Black woman and the only person of color involved in the case. She alleged that her political science professor, Raymond Duvall, propositioned her, offering her an “A” in his course in exchange for sex. She refused and received a “C” in the course. Price feared the grade would jeopardize her chances of getting into law school, so she reported the alleged incident of quid pro quo sexual harassment to two different administrators, who handled it as a grade dispute, not as an allegation of sex discrimination. Unsatisfied with this response, Price joined Alexander.
Magistrate Judge Arthur Latimer decided to hear the motion to dismiss, ultimately concluding that all the claims were invalid—except Price’s. Latimer recalled his reaction to her claim: “This was a question of time sensitivity: a direct incident of claimed sexual harassment; a direct impact on transcript; direct impact on grad school applications. . . . It’s all or nothing right now.” On December 21, 1977, Latimer denied Yale’s motion to dismiss Price’s claim, writing in his decision, “It is perfectly reasonable to maintain that academic advancement conditioned upon submission to sexual demands constitutes sex discrimination in education.” Price’s case would go to trial. Moreover, Latimer’s decision marked the first time a court had recognized sexual harassment as a violation of the right to equal educational opportunity, officially establishing a new purpose for Title IX and marking a crucial step toward realizing the alternative future the Yale students and their lawyers had envisioned together.
transforming university governance
In addition to validating a new vision for Title IX, the Alexander decision initiated a shift in university governance. Weeks after Latimer’s ruling, in February 1978, the dean of Yale College formed an “advisory committee on grievance procedures” to develop procedures for addressing student complaints of discriminatory treatment by faculty, including sexual harassment. In its final report, released in March 1979, the committee outlined a “separate and specialized” process to address quid pro quo sexual harassment, which “exploits unfairly the power inherent in an instructor’s relationship to his or her student.” The report recommended establishing a grievance board to adjudicate complaints through a nine-step process involving fact-finding, mediation, and a ruling that could include disciplinary action. The new system was essential, they argued, because the “very possibility of sexual harassment may be enormously destructive to individual students, to the person complained of and to the educational climate of the college.”
Providing an equitable educational environment involved regulating sexual harassment through special internal policies and procedures, descendants of which still exist on contemporary college campuses.
These bureaucratic structures, which the Yale College faculty quickly approved, marked the emergence of a new and explicitly legalistic way of governing gender relations in higher education. Colleges and universities had long managed social and sexual conduct—through, for example, curfews—but the legal dimension of this approach was new and resulted directly from Alexander, which expanded universities’ obligations to ensure equal educational opportunity and explicitly recognized the gendered dimensions of power in faculty-student relationships. In this new context, providing an equitable educational environment now involved regulating sexual harassment through special internal policies and procedures, descendants of which still exist on contemporary college campuses.
extending—and solidifying—these transformations
Ultimately, the students lost their case against Yale on appeal, partly because the school had established a sexual harassment grievance process during the lawsuit. Still, the Yale coalition had achieved two key goals. It established sexual harassment as unlawful sex discrimination in education, and, in the words of Yale’s lead lawyer, “creat[ed] the need for a special, different procedure for handling sexual harassment” on campus. Reflecting on the case 40 years later, Alexander concisely summarized its impact:
> [T]he situation changed from “Oh, this is the way it is, I mean that’s just the way life is. Women get assaulted; women get harassed.” All of a sudden it was like, “No, there could be a different world.” Understanding Title IX in that way was a real surprise. More than a surprise. It was like, they call them “aha moments.” The case of Title IX reflects the tremendous power of coalitions that cut across difference, break open our understandings of what is possible, allow us to see alternative futures, and provide new pathways for action. Through these boundary-crossing collaborations, individuals at the grassroots can use law and policy to push our society toward justice and equality, even if only incrementally.
Alexander helped these women—and many others, as my book demonstrates—imagine a different reality for gender relations on campus and lit a path toward that reality through bureaucratic structures and processes, with all their promises and pitfalls. The case set into motion broader transformations in antidiscrimination law, university administration, and campus norms that remain today.
For all its importance, however, the interpretation of Title IX that Magistrate Latimer legitimated in Alexander did not officially extend beyond the state of Connecticut. Women Organized Against Sexual Harassment (WOASH), a group of students at Berkeley, brought this new understanding of gender equity in education to bear on more wide-ranging and long-lasting shifts in American law and educational governance. Berkeley students had created WOASH in 1978 with the immediate goal of supporting students who had filed sexual harassment complaints against Assistant Professor of Sociology Elbaki Hermassi. But WOASH wanted to do more than just hold Hermassi accountable. “The idea,” as founding member Ruth Milkman, a Berkeley sociology graduate student and future ASA president, explained, “was to use the specific case as a way of coming to terms with the general issue.” She continued, “As we learned more about the inadequacy of the university’s existing mechanisms for handling the problem [of sexual harassment], we took on the development of a grievance procedure, etc., as a specific task.” Berkeley faculty and administrators, like those at Yale, were perplexed by how to respond to sexual harassment, which had only recently emerged as an identifiable social problem. Indeed, after hearing the complaints against Hermassi, Professor and Acting Department Chair Arlie Hochschild wrote in a memo to the faculty: “I consulted with a great number of people, including the University lawyer. (No one has experience dealing with a situation similar to this one.)” WOASH hoped to work with school officials to design a new process for addressing student complaints of sexual harassment against faculty.
But administrators did not provide the relief WOASH wanted, and so the students began searching for other solutions. Influenced directly by Pamela Price, who had moved from Yale to Berkeley for law school, and in coalition with Bay Area lawyers at Equal Rights Advocates, who had also communicated with the New Haven Law Collective about Alexander, WOASH filed the first federal complaint alleging that a university had violated Title IX by failing to provide a sexual harassment grievance process. Their 1979 complaint created an opening for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Office for Civil Rights—the primary federal agency responsible for enforcing Title IX—to validate this application of the law and the compliance requirements associated with it, thereby pressuring schools across the nation to implement sexual harassment response systems. By 1985, hundreds of colleges and universities had instituted these systems, many of them modeled after Yale’s.
reimaging and reconfiguring our social world in coalition
Just a few decades ago, sexual harassment was a normal and accepted part of the college experience. Victims had nowhere to go with their complaints, and schools had no obligation to address them. In coalition with feminist lawyers, similarly minded students in the 1970s and 1980s changed this world. To be clear, there is still much more work ahead to eliminate sexual harassment in schools, but these women took a crucial first step by using Title IX. The law’s vague language served as a telescope to a different world and a tool for making it real. Together, these women reimagined equality under American law and incorporated this new conception into the systems that govern us, the organizations that educate us, and the cultures that guide our social behavior. The case of Title IX reflects the tremendous power of coalitions that cut across difference, break open our understandings of what is possible, allow us to see alternative futures, and provide new pathways for action. Through these boundary-crossing collaborations, individuals at the grassroots can use law and policy to push our society toward justice and equality, even if only incrementally.
The potential power of these coalitions is especially salient in our current historical moment, when our leaders are reimagining Title IX and other laws to do just the opposite—to restrict women’s rights as well as the rights of transgender people, racial and ethnic minorities, and other historically marginalized groups. Collaborations between diverse networks can be a powerful tool for resisting and redirecting these recent shifts. The feminist movement has long struggled to overcome its internal divisions, but now is the time for us to transcend them so that we can, as MacKinnon writes in her 1989 book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, more actively “participate in defining the terms that create the standards, [and] be a voice in drawing the lines,” just as the feminists who transformed Title IX did nearly half a century ago.
recommended resources
Carrie N. Baker. 2008. The Women’s Movement against Sexual Harassment. Cambridge University Press. A rich history of the coalition of feminists that made sexual harassment at work into an issue of national concern during the 1970s and 1980s.
Nicole Bedera. 2024. On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. University of California Press. A qualitative study of contemporary approaches to addressing sexual misconduct under Title IX and how they fall short in enhancing equity.
Linda M. Blum and Ethel L. Mickey. 2018. "Women Organized against Sexual Harassment: A Grassroots Struggle for Title IX Enforcement, 1978–1980," Feminist Formations 30(2). An empirical account of WOASH’s actions from a former WOASH member.
Shamira Gelbman. 2021. The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction. Temple University Press. Painstaking archival research provides a detailed account of how a key interest group, and its diverse membership, enabled the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Tamara Rice Lave. 2022. Sexual Assault on Campus: Defending Due Process. Cambridge University Press. A detailed legal analysis of Title IX’s application to sexual misconduct, with special focus on recent policy developments.