Sexual Harassment and the Law: The Mechelle Vinson Case

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may have outlawed sex discrimination, but it did not address the sexual harassment of women in the workplace—behavior that courts did not deem illegal until well into the era of the modern civil rights and women's movements. Mechelle Vinson’s lawsuit against her employer, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), changed all of that. Adopting the legal theory pioneered by feminist Catharine MacKinnon that sexual harassment was indeed discriminatory, the S...