The Emotional Cost of Sexual Harassment in Working Women

"I have a problem at work with men who make suggestive remarks," complained one working mother. "It's the sort of thing that can send you home in a rotten mood." Many working women echo this complaint. "It's a constant battle," said a young woman who works in a bank. "These guys will do almost anything to break down my resistance. It ranges from inviting me out to lunch to asking me to run away to Florida with them. What bothers me most is that it seems to be getting worse."

Although women's groups are winning legal battles against such behavior, "no one believes that legalities will eliminate sexual harassment," as Newsweek magazine pointed out recently. The emotional cost can be severe. "In one study, women who felt sexually harassed reported suffering from headaches, nausea, and sleeplessness." This is a cost that must be weighed, even when a woman works in a "nice location-such as a bank.

New mothers who return to work find themselves paying an unexpected emotional cost. "I naively thought it would be easy to go back," said Margaret, who returned to work only five weeks after the birth of her son. "I was all primed to return, and then Justin started smiling for the first time-that was when he was a month old-and all of a sudden motherhood seemed so marvelous that all I could think was: 'I can't go back and miss all these fantastic subtle things that are happening to him. . . . I can't go back because I might damage him.' Well, I did go back, and it was agony."

Costs to Children

Sarah, a young mother of two, quit work after the birth of her second child. "I quit for the kids," she says. "I feel very strongly that a mother should spend as much time as possible with her own children. I don't want to jeopardize the unity of my family for an extra dollar."

Asked if she felt that not working had made a difference in her family life, she replied emphatically: "I've been able to see a big difference in my kids since I quit working. They are much more open with me. We communicate better. When I was working I could see my daughter drifting away from me. What should you expect? She was spending all day at her grandmother's house. Now I can see a real difference between my kids and the children of working mothers I know."

Of course, adjustments had to be made when this working mother quit working. "We had to cut down on some things," she admits. "My big weakness is clothes and I've had to learn to wait for sales instead of just buying something when I feel like it. My husband takes his lunch to work in a bag instead of eating out now, and that helps too."

True, not all working mothers can afford to quit working and spend more time with their children. In some cases economic fluctuations have cost the husband his job, and the wife's job is the family's sole income. With the rising divorce rate in most countries, more and more mothers find themselves raising children without the help of a mate, and with insufficient alimony.

Nevertheless, in many cases, wives and mothers are working-not for the family's survival, but simply to maintain the family's accustomed standard of living. Here, especially, is where the question needs to be asked: Is it worth it?

Robert Coles, child psychiatrist, made these observations about family life in the United States: "Family life has become, for a lot of people, a matter of materialism: How much does this family own, and how much can it hold on to? People are living very comfortably in the sense that they have several cars and an air-conditioning unit and a television; yet they are tearing one another's souls apart." Doesn't this indicate that a review of priorities is needed?

Source: Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination by Catharine A. MacKinnon (Author)