Contemplating the rise of bureaucratic capitalism in the West, sociologist Max Weber argued that its cultural legitimacy derived from the removal of love, hatred, and all other strong emotions from the workplace. After reading this terrific book, one has to wonder what office Weber was talking about. Sex and the Office uncovers the history of sexuality in white-collar offices. Examining US office culture from the nineteenth century to the present, it shows how heterosexuality is embedded in formal and informal workplace norms. It charts the rise of feminist protests against sexual harassment in the 1970s, but shows how misogyny has nevertheless persisted in society's reactions to ubiquitous sexual behaviour at work. It documents a striking ambivalence toward women in public discourse on gender, sexuality, and power: women are the victims of powerful male predators, yet women have sexual agency and often benefit from their liaisons with these men. Men cannot control their sexual desires when in the company of attractive young women, yet women are castigated if they “sleep their way to the top.” In other words, women are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Although she emphasizes this consistent pattern in the history of sex and the office, Julie Berebitsky takes special pains to reconstruct discourses in the decades before “sexual harassment” had a name. This is not an easy task, granted that she is interested in mostly hidden experiences that occurred behind closed doors. In the early years of office culture, women workers who were sexually propositioned or attacked were ashamed to come forward because their own reputations were at stake. Berebitsky has to imagine what these sexual encounters meant to the women who lived through them. She uses a variety of sources to do so, including advice columns, newspaper stories, professional journals, popular films, and corporate and union archives. She also includes reprints of published cartoons and advertisements so ludicrous that they alone are worth the cost of the book. Interpreting these sources can be tricky, but Berebitsky has a wonderfully light touch, always careful not to attribute twenty-first-century sensibilities to nineteenth-century stenographers. Even in recounting episodes that would result in jail time today, she encourages the reader to travel back in time and understand how such egregious behaviours might have appeared plausible, expected, and even legitimate to the men who initiated them and to the women who were targeted.

The book begins with the story of a young woman's suicide after evidently false rumours surfaced that she had an affair with her much older married boss. In the late nineteenth century, to be suspected of having sex with a boss would ruin a woman's career, and maybe even her life. Fast forward to the 1960s, when Helen Gurley Brown is advising women to use their sex appeal to get ahead in the business world, and complaining that she was never the target of “scuttle.” Scuttle was the popular office game in which a group of men chased after a woman and when they caught her they removed her panties – all in great fun. (That particular example strains even Berebitsky's historical empathy.) Today scuttling would result in an accusation of sexual harassment (at least) and would likely ruin a man's career.

But this is not a story about the triumphant march of feminist progress. Berebitsky emphasizes how American attitudes about sex in the office have not changed very much over the century. Granted, in the past women's only options when faced with unwanted sexual attention were (1) avoid, (2) ignore, or (3) run away. Today they have a fourth option: file a lawsuit. What women still do not have, however, is public credibility. Later chapters in the book recount over twenty years of sex scandals, from the Elizabeth Ray–Wayne Hays scandal of 1976, to the Mary Cunningham–William Agee affair at Bendix in 1980, to the loathsome Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings of 1991, ending with the Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton impeachment trial in 1998. Each of these notorious cases involved powerful men and the women who worked for them, and none of the women came out unscathed. Granted the persistence of gendered power in organizations, any alternative is inconceivable. And that is the most compelling lesson of this excellent book: in a society dominated by men, heterosexuality offers both pleasures and dangers for women. Both are exacerbated in the world of work, where economic livelihoods are at stake. Unless and until men's power over women is attenuated, ambivalence will be the inevitable result, and office women will be screwed.