ABSTRACT
In late 1978 a group of undergraduate and graduate women at the University of California, Berkeley organized to protest sexual harassment on campus and press for action on multiple complaints against a faculty member. At the time, Title IX was relatively new, few people had heard of the term “sexual harassment,” and even fewer were likely to understand it as a form of sex discrimination or denial of equal educational opportunities for women. The university in 1978, needless to say, had no formal grievance procedure or reporting mechanism to handle such cases. The group – naming itself Women Organized Against Sexual Harassment or WOASH – engaged in intense activity over a two-year period to protest and work to establish such a procedure. Fast-forward to 2014, and a group of women students on the same campus had filed a civil lawsuit against the administration for failing to properly respond to their complaints of sexual assault as a violation of Title IX and their similar rights to equal educational opportunities (Golgowski 2015). Struck by the parallels between these two episodes separated by over 30 years, we have revisited the history of the original group to better understand the local politics of sexual harassment and the linkages between past and present instances of grassroots feminism on campus. Revisiting the history of WOASH also furthers understanding of the complex, decentered character of second-wave feminism.
