Women College Students and the Fight against Sexual Harassment: The First Ten Years, 1971–1981

More than 50 years after the term “sexual harassment” was coined in 1971, the problem persists, with 59% of U.S. women undergraduates reporting that they have been sexually harassed since enrolling in college. Historical narrative offers a deeper understanding of current issues, yet the historiography of higher education has remained almost entirely mute regarding the origins of the fight to end sexual harassment on college campuses. This article addresses this gap by examining a foundational decade in this battle, 1971 to 1981. This is a historical study, and as such, the data consists of primary documents from the period. The article focuses on sexual harassment of women by men professors and administrators. While this study provides national context throughout, I chronicle the advance of protections for women students through the lens of one campus in particular: Yale University. Yale’s women activists were at the forefront of the fight against sexual harassment in this decade. It was Yale women who first coined the term “sexual harassment” in 1971, and Yale women who in 1977 filed Alexander v. Yale, the federal lawsuit that led the court to declare, for the first time, that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for practice and future research.