Lin Farley (born December 14, 1942) is an American author, journalist and
feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
. She was a leader in calling attention to the problems faced by
women in the workforce
Since the industrial revolution, participation of women in the workforce outside the home has increased in industrialized nations, with particularly large growth seen in the 20th century. Largely seen as a boon for industrial society, women in ...
, in particular
sexual harassment
Sexual harassment is a type of harassment involving the use of explicit or implicit sexual overtones, including the unwelcome and inappropriate promises of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. Sexual harassment includes a range of actions fro ...
.
Sexual harassment
In 1974, she was hired by
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
as director of the university's
Women's Section
The women's page (sometimes called home page or women's section) of a newspaper was a section devoted to covering news assumed to be of interest to women. Women's pages started out in the 19th century as society pages and eventually morphed into ...
and lecturer for a field study course called Women and Work. In a 1974
consciousness raising discussion connected with that course, she began to realize the extent of the problem that she later termed "sexual harassment". As the women in the class described their experiences in the workplace she noticed a pattern: every woman there had either quit or been fired from a job because they had been made so uncomfortable by the behavior of men. She discovered that this phenomenon of male harassment and intimidation of female workers had not been described in the literature and was not publicly recognized as a problem, although she continued to hear it described by women from all walks of life.
In 1975, inspired by the case of
Carmita Wood, an administrative assistant to Cornell professor
Boyce McDaniel, the group at Cornell formed the anti-harassment organization
Working Women United
Working Women United (WWU) (later known as the Working Women United Institute) is a women's rights organisation based in the United States which was formed in Ithaca, New York in 1975, to combat sexual harassment of women in the workplace.
In the ...
. Wood had resigned after she developed physical symptoms due to the stress of fighting off McDaniel's persistent sexual advances. After Cornell denied her unemployment compensation, Wood approached the Human Affairs Office, which was staffed by Farley and two other committed feminists, Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigné.
In April 1975, she testified before the New York City Human Rights Commission Hearings on Women and Work, led by
Eleanor Holmes Norton. She defined sexual harassment as "unwanted sexual advances against women employees by male supervisors, bosses, foremen or managers." She gave examples: "It often means that a woman is hired because she is pretty, regardless of her qualifications; that a woman's job security is eternally dependent on how well she pleases her boss, and he often thinks sexual companionship is part of the job description; and that women are fired because they have aged or they are too independent or they say 'no' to sexual byplay."
A ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''
reporter
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
who heard her testimony wrote about it,
and by the end of 1975 her message had reached a national audience. Government agencies began to recognize sexual harassment as a problem to be addressed. Norton's Human Right's Commission added language to their
affirmative action agreements guaranteeing "protection to male and female employees alike against unfair abuse of sexual privacy".
Over the following decades Farley gave numerous public and academic presentations on the topic, and served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor, the
AFL-CIO, civil rights organizations and women's study programs.
She wrote a book, ''Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job'',
published by McGraw-Hill in 1978 and in a paperback version by Warner Books in 1980. In it she traced the history of sexual harassment as a longstanding issue
and gave contemporary examples, such as help-wanted advertisements implying that acceptance of sexual interaction was part of the job description. The book established sexual harassment as an important topic on the feminist agenda.
The
Christian Science Monitor said the book was "an overdue alert to the sexual harassment of working women by male employers which starkly reveals the emotional and physical degradations inflicted on women in the exploitive politics of power at their most base."
In 1981, she collaborated on the 33-minute documentary ''The Workplace Hustle,'' produced by Woody Clark and Al Brito and narrated by
Ed Asner. Farley was a consultant and also appeared in the film. It was intended as a training film for workplaces, and it was widely used for that purpose by government agencies as well as corporations like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard. It won awards at the San Francisco Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.
Background and personal life
Her parents, Vincent and Beatrice Farley, were working-class people; both were
shop stewards
A union representative, union steward, or shop steward is an employee of an organization or company who represents and defends the interests of their fellow employees as a labor union member and official. Rank-and-file members of the union hold ...
in their respective unions.
Her parents had little education, but read widely. She later commented, "My mother had a hard life and all her dreams were stifled. I know that I became a feminist and wrote ''Sexual Shakedown'' in part because I had become sensitized from her experiences as a working woman."
She attended local public schools in New Jersey and then in Downey, California. During her senior year she was elected the Youth Governor of both the California YMCA Youth & Government (Y&G) Model Legislature Program, and the American Legion Auxiliary's Girls State. She was the 12th and first female Youth Governor for California's Y&G Program. She started and dropped out of several colleges before going to the
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...
on a journalism scholarship. Before graduation she went to work for the ''
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
'' in New York as a reporter and feature writer.
She taught at Cornell from 1974 to 1976, then became a freelance consultant on women's issues while writing her book.} She received a master's degree in Eastern and Western Psychology from
Naropa University
Naropa University is a private university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the 11th-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda. The university describes itself as B ...
in 1985. She earned a PhD in Eastern Psychology from the
California Institute of Integral Studies in 1993; her thesis was titled "The secret world of men: Men's attitudes, beliefs, fantasies and desires with regard to women and children".
She lived in
Taipei
Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the n ...
for three years while writing for the English-language publication ''
Free China Journal''. Returning to the United States, she became a consultant to computer companies on
human factors engineering.
References
External links
Document List: How Did Diverse Activists in the Second Wave of the Women's Movement Shape Emerging Public Policy on Sexual Harassment?
{{DEFAULTSORT:Farley, Lin
1942 births
Living people
American feminist writers
American women writers
21st-century American women