What is Sexual Harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne (review)

What is the cultural life of a legal category? This important question in sociology of law moves researchers beyond the boundaries of formal legal institutions and actors and recognizes that law shapes the way we organize our families, workplaces, neighborhoods, and even our thoughts. Abigail Saguy's analysis of the cultural significance of sexual harassment in France and the United States makes an important contribution to this research tradition.

Sexual harassment is a legal concept that has spilled out of the courtroom and into workplaces, the mass media, politics, and the consciousness of ordinary men and women all over the world. While the concept may be familiar, it has distinct cultural meanings in the political and legal traditions of different countries. In the United States, sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that interferes with women's equal employment opportunities. In the 1970s, when the claim for sexual harassment first emerged, lawyers drew on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the great achievements of the civil rights movement. The legal prohibition against sexual harassment followed a much different trajectory in France. While France had no civil rights movement, French workers have enjoyed expansive legal protection in the workplace. Given these political commitments, French feminists and activists chose to emphasize the abuse of power, framing sexual harassment as a form of sexual violence, akin to rape. As a result, sexual harassment has been criminalized in France. Harassers can be prosecuted, but employers are not legally responsible for such conduct.

Illustrating how the law in action diverges from the law on the books, Saguy's comparative method provides unique insights into the mechanisms responsible for this divergence. In the United States, employers' fear of liability for sexual harassment is the engine that drives corporate policy-making and law enforcement on this issue. Structural features of the American legal system—such as damage awards and contingency fee arrangements—make these lawsuits possible. Saguy also offers a cultural explanation for the lawsuits. She argues that mass-media reports about large damage awards in sexual harassment cases encourage victims to file lawsuits. In her account, personnel managers promptly handle the few grievances they receive, and plaintiffs' lawyers often have to turn away women because their complaints are not serious enough to constitute sexual harassment. By contrast, French employers do not take sexual harassment seriously. They view sexual harassment as a puritanical import from the United States. French employers have not adopted policies, nor are they particularly interested in handling employee complaints. Saguy argues that this corporate indifference also has structural and cultural explanations. First, the criminal penalties for harassment make women reluctant to complain. In addition, French law makes damage awards unlikely. Finally, Saguy claims that French victims of sexual harassment are not likely to file lawsuits because of "the shame and guilt most victims feel about the harassment."

Saguy's evidence of victims' motivations, however, is limited to the observations of human resource managers and attorneys, who are probably biased informants. Moreover, French and American women may not be as different on this dimension as Saguy suggests. An ample literature on sexual harassment in the United States—not cited in this study—has shown that American women also feel shame and guilt about their experiences. As a result, women in the United States rarely complain to anyone about sexual harassment—let alone pursue a formal legal complaint (Fitzgerald, Swan, and Fischer 1995; MSPB 1995; Welsh 1995). Indeed, interviews with French and American victims of sexual harassment were outside the scope of this already extensive study, but their omission should have made the author slightly more cautious about the conclusions she drew from her data.

The law in action mirrors widespread cultural beliefs about sexual harassment in the United States and France. Saguy's cultural analysis is based on a content analysis of press reports about sexual harassment and interviews with "cultural entrepreneurs"—individuals "who, through their jobs...