Hostile environment : the political betrayal of sexually harassed women /

If the 1991 Hill-Thomas hearings constituted a national seminar on sexual harassment, the events of the mid-1990s seemed to suggest that "the class" suffered from selective retention, perhaps owing to the confusing response of the feminist movement to the charges of Paula Jones against President Bill Clinton. Mink (Univ. of California-Santa Cruz), in a scathing rebuke to Clinton's feminist supporters, charges that they raised the political and legal thresholds for taking sexual harassment seriously and so undermined those laws that women may not use them in the future. Feminists did not take Jones seriously, nor did they fight so that she might receive a fair legal hearing. Using lay language, Mink carefully traces the development of the case law here. As one who filed one of the early sexual harassment grievances against a graduate professor and a well-known critic of Clinton's welfare reform plan (see Welfare's End; CH, Sept'98), Mink's objectivity can be questioned, but hers is a logical, passionate, and provocative answer to one of that era's most puzzling questions. In light of pro-Clinton books like Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy (1999), this is a valuable resource for all collections. J. K. Boles; Marquette University

On the surface, these two books would seem to have something in common--they both talk about the "M" word (Monica, that is) and President Clinton. However, they do so in two very different ways. In The Scarlet Thread, Dunn (dean, Grove City Coll.) looks at presidential scandals from Washington to Clinton and puts them into historical context. He argues that the president's morality both reflects and influences the moral mood of the nation. He pays particular attention to the last 70 years and concludes that except for the upright Reagan era, the country has been steeped in a moral morass since the Kennedy administration. While he does provide a historical context for scandals, his conservative bias, especially where it concerns the last 40 years, takes away from the impact of his argument. Not recommended. Mink's Hostile Environment is a case history of sexual harassment law. Mink (political science, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) wrote it, she says, to defend sexual harassment plaintiffs against the "all-too-convenient redefinition of what sexual harassment is and what the law guards against." She provides a case-by-case history of sexual harassment law and argues that Judge Susan Webber Wright's judgment that President Clinton's behavior did not constitute harassment because he accepted "no" for an answer does serious harm to the laws. She finds feminist support of the President equally troublesome. Much of the book focuses on explaining how sexual harrassment laws could, very soon, become worthless. A lucid and interesting history of sexual harassment law; recommended for academic and large public collections.--Roseanne Castellino, Arthur D. Little, Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.