As grassroots organizing reemerges as a tool for replenishing American democracy, it becomes all the more important to evaluate its achievements during the era of civil rights and second wave feminist activism. Carrie N. Baker's book provides a detailed account of grassroots activists focused on sexual harassment. Much of the book is devoted to examining the previously undocumented activities of two organizations, the Working Women United (WWU) and Alliance Against Sexual Coercion (AASC). Her central question concerns the power of collective action to change worldviews, and in particular, to explain the transformation of public consciousness about workplace harassment from a trivial matter to its understanding as a serious problem affecting women's place in the public sphere.

Baker chronicles this transformation from the first sexual harassment cases filed in 1971 to the Meritor Savings Bank decision in 1986. While these landmark cases provide a backdrop for her analysis, the book focuses on the motivations of grassroots activists and efforts of notable plaintiffs. She emphasizes the parallels to other activist campaigns associated with the feminist movement especially anti-rape crisis organizing. The early movement had clear feminist objectives—to gain public and legal recognition of sexual harassment as a fundamental abuse of power over women by males in the workplace.

Yet this exceptionally well-researched examination of early activism also reveals the diverse perspectives within the movement. Early organizations sought to bring together waitresses, college professors, and factory workers to learn from each other. This coming together was aimed at solving the practical and immediate concerns of women facing workplace harassment, such as fighting rules that denied unemployment compensation for women escaping abuse at their jobs. The author points out the multiple roles of the activists—testifying before Congress, serving as information banks, running hotlines, publishing newsletters, and conducting trainings. Early on the groups emphasized “extra-legal” activities and saw the importance of working beyond the individual level and organizing at the institutional level.

Baker chooses to document the ideological divisions between activists without taking sides among feminist positions. Many readers will surely welcome her neutrality, but it leads to an underplaying of the differences and their significance for the course of the movement. The early divisions reflected a key feminist dilemma: whether sexual harassment was primarily an issue of “gender domination” or the result of labor issues endemic to a capitalist economy. These differences are important because they ultimately had an effect on strategy. Baker's assessment is that an ideological framework that focused on a victim/perpetrator dichotomy was, indeed, necessary to frame sexual harassment as a violation of Title VII and activists ultimately chose this strategy because it was the most likely to get judges to rule in their favor.

Ideological differences were not the only issue dividing the movement; in the late 1970's one of the two major organizations, the Alliance, began to question the reliance on legal solutions. Concerns were raised about the increase in government involvement with sexual harassment—especially because it led to case-by-case legal redress rather than promoting institutional organizing or direct services that would meet a variety of women's needs. Baker does the important work of documenting that these disagreements existed and that some activists, at that time, clearly saw the problems with a bureaucratic/legal response to sexual harassment. She notes this ambivalence but puts it in the context of more pressing issues inhibiting social change: the still persistent belief that sexual harassment is a frivolous concern and the beginning of a backlash movement against feminism that came to full force in the early 1980s. While this is a compelling perspective, it turns away from asking hard questions about the desirability of the mainstreaming of the movement that was happening in the late 1970s. For example, it is important to ask whether mainstreaming promoted some feminist views of the issue over others and how it affected the message and strategies of the movement?

It is also important to consider the effect of mainstreaming on a diverse movement. Blue-collar women, for example, might have been better served by a more institutionalized approach that relied on preexisting union structures or targeted industry-wide audiences. There are also implications in terms of how the movement reflected its racial diversity. Baker notes that black women brought many of the early cases and concludes that this strengthened the activists' awareness of the links between sex and race discrimination. However, the conditions that created success for combined race and sexual harassment claims in the early 1970s are not necessarily recreated in a legal context where victims are publicly scrutinized (as the Clarence Thomas hearing demonstrated). Moreover, white middle-class women's perceptions about the desirability of bureaucratic procedures may reflect their greater trust in procedural justice (a factor that significantly varies by race and class).

This book will be a valuable resource for both scholars and students who seek to make retrospective evaluations of feminist grassroots politics. Baker's overall conclusion is that “[d]espite continuing struggles, the history of the movement against sexual harassment is in many ways an incredible success story (p. 177).” Although she offers some qualifications, there is not much consideration of the wrong turns. Baker acknowledges some of them, by quoting the considered wisdom of the historian Linda Gordon, who recognized as early as 1981 that the “sexualized” understanding of the issue not only created divisions among feminists but also made the movement more susceptible to attacks by the backlash movement. But Baker also counts among the victories that “the movement took advantage of the growing institutional structure created by governments' in response to the civil rights and women's movements” (p. 177). This kind of institutionalization, however, could be considered a diversion from the original goals of the movement. In fact, the book documents a far more interesting success story: the deep complexity of the early activists' understanding of the issue and their openness to a range of strategies. This shows how grassroots mobilization productively drew upon the intelligence of those most affected by oppression in the workplace.