[In the following essay, Olsen presents an overview of MacKinnon's life and body of work.]

Not since the 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Charles Warren and Louis Brandeis initiated the cause of action for violation of privacy has an author been as closely identified with a new cause of action as Catharine MacKinnon has been with sexual harassment.

MacKinnon, who now holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. degree in political science, was a student at Yale when sexual harassment cases first arose in the 1970s. To some feminist attorneys, it seemed self-evident that quid pro quo harassment constituted sex discrimination. Hostile environment harassment, too, struck many as an obvious method of excluding or driving away women, and thus a form of sex discrimination. But a number of federal district judges, perhaps in part because they were primarily men who took male privilege for granted, accepted men's sexual overtures toward women as natural compliments, rather than as hostile discrimination. A supervisor's retaliation was seen as an understandable, if somewhat cowardly, response to an embarrassing personal rebuff. To these judges, sexual harassment was merely a personal matter. And while it was not commendable, it also was not sex discrimination. The first cases reaching federal district courts were summarily dismissed.

In response, MacKinnon proposed a radical view that did much to set the terms of the subsequent debate. In 1979, her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women was published by the Yale University Press. On first reading, it seemed a scholarly work of some importance; closer examination revealed that the book also contained a new theory of the foundation for women's oppression.

MacKinnon's book examined the structure of sexual relations in modern society and found exploitation and inequality at the core. Sexual harassment, in this view, was not simply an abuse of an employment position or an effort to exploit women's inferior status in the workplace. Rather, it was part of a broader dynamic. Sexual harassment disadvantages women as a gender, argued MacKinnon; the harm comes in a social context in which women's economic survival and sexual exploitation are constructed and joined to women's detriment. MacKinnon further contended that antidiscrimination law should do more than merely pick out and condemn those laws and policies that were based on inaccurate or outmoded stereotypes and that thus failed to mirror society. Instead, she said, it should seek to eliminate the subordination of women to men. With inequality “sexualized,” and sexuality reinforcing gender inequality, sexual exploitation was seen as central to other forms of oppression of women by men.

Sexual Harassment of Working Women was widely circulated before publication among litigators at the cutting edge of sex discrimination law. It contributed to the eventual judicial recognition of sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, and it has changed the perception of sexual harassment from a workplace hazard to a form of sexual abuse. It also changed the way constitutional equal protection law was taught in law schools. In 1981, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe introduced MacKinnon's theories about sex discrimination into his constitutional law class—the first established male law professor, I believe, to do so.

Federal appellate courts began to recognize sexual harassment, overturning lower courts, and in 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidelines forbidding both quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual harassment. The notion of sexual harassment also spread internationally. The European Union followed the U.S. example and began conceptualizing sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, and in 1992 Japan decided its first sexual harassment case, relying importantly on U.S. law, although basing the action in tort rather than in civil rights.

MacKinnon participated in the two major challenges to sexual harassment in the U.S. Supreme Court—Meritor Saving Bank v. Vinson, the 1986 case in which the Supreme Court for the first time accepted certiorari and recognized sexual harassment as a cause of action, and Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., the 1998 case approving a hostile environment sexual harassment action by a man against other men. The recognition that sexual overtures can indeed be intended as hostile now seems firmly fixed in law.

The same analysis of sexuality as the linchpin of women's inequality lay at the center of some of MacKinnon's more controversial positions regarding rape and pornography. Echoing feminist poet Adrienne Rich's assertion that society coerces women into heterosexual relations, MacKinnon has argued that under conditions of male dominance, male sexual initiative in general cannot be sharply distinguished from rape. Some (mis)understood her to mean that all sexual relations are rape. She and Andrea Dworkin drafted a municipal ordinance making pornography a violation of women's equality and providing a civil cause of action against pornographers; free speech advocates were outraged, and succeeded in having the ordinance declared unconstitutional.

The daughter of a prominent Republican who was named a federal judge by President Nixon, Catharine MacKinnon followed a path similar to that of many feminists before her. Like theirs, her route was often rough in spite of the privileged position from which she began. She became a law professor, but for years she had to struggle through a series of temporary and untenured positions. She considered dropping out of teaching, and even exiled herself to Canada until, finally, the University of Michigan School of Law offered her a tenured professorship in 1989. Combining teaching, law practice, and public advocacy, she has made an important contribution to the field of feminist legal theory, and thus to legal theory generally. Her work regarding sexual harassment remains her most original contribution and her most important legacy.