Catharine A. MacKinnon

Life and ideas

Catharine MacKinnon is an American lawyer and professor, at Michigan and at Harvard among other places, who changed the law of sex equality. Her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) argued that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination, an idea accepted by the United States Supreme Court in 1986 and by many countries since. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) she argued that the law and the state have treated the male viewpoint as neutral, and that equality law should ask not whether women are treated like men but whether women are kept in a subordinate position. With Andrea Dworkin she helped to draft ordinances against pornography, which divided feminists. She also brought cases of sexual violence in war before courts.