"Too Much of Distasteful Masculinity": Historicizing Sexual Harassment in the Garment Sweatshop and Factory

Sexual harassment is often described only as a "common experience" to women's labors. An examination of the turn-of-the-century garment industry demonstrates how harassment did more than render work uncomfortable for women—it was central to how men constructed and protected definitions of skill and the naturalness of sexual segregation at work. Initial resistance to harassment by immigrant Jewish and Italian female workers was difficult. By the 1910s, however, working women in collaboration with elite reformers turned to strategies of unionization and languages of ladyhood. Yet their efforts tended to focus on the experience of harassment, rather than on its relationship to hierarchies of skill and pay. In addition, unionization focused attention on the harassment by bosses alone. Sexual harassment should be understood as a historically specific, unequal form of interaction and as a tool for the policing and naturalization of sexual difference at work.