Class: A Useful Category of Analysis in the History of Sexual Harassment

Abstract

Abstract Beginning with Leonora Barry of the Knights of Labor, women in the labor movement have envisioned class action as a means of overcoming sexual harassment. Drawing upon Brooke Meredith Beloso's emphasis on the “class constitution of gender and sexuality” and “gendered and sexual constitution of class,” this essay considers four historical phases—the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Great Depression and Second World War, and the present era since the 1970s—to maintain the value of class as an analytic category in understanding sexual harassment and resistance to it in the history of American capitalism. Attentive to gender and race, it contests perspectives that erase or subordinate class while in turn seeking to situate class within a full-spectrum intersectionality. Bringing class back in reveals sexual harassment to be one form of the enactment of class, not merely gender. Although sexual harassment can in no way be reduced to class, class shapes sexual harassment and sexual harassment shapes class.