Catharine MacKinnon Interview: Paving the Way for Gender Equality in Law and Society

Catharine MacKinnon recalls taking a course on constitutional law in college that sparked her passion for understanding how law and political theory intersected and shaped society. MacKinnon discuss how she turned her senior analytic paper in law school that focused on sexual harassment and its relationship to sex discrimination into a book, aiming to make the issue more understandable to male judges and society at large. Mackinon stresses the importance of continually working to ensure that sexual harassment laws are well-developed and effectively enforced.

Catharine A. MacKinnon was born on October 7, 1946 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a lawyer, congressman, and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She is the third generation of her family to attend her mother's alma mater, Smith College. She obtained her J.D. from Yale University in 1977, and PhD from Yale in 1987. MacKinnon is a lawyer, teacher, writer, and activist on sex equality issues domestically and internationally. She is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and from 2008-2012 was the first Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. She has been the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School since 2009. Widely published in many languages, her dozen books include Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005), Are Women Human? (2006), her casebook Sex Equality (2016), and Butterfly Politics (2017). She conceived sexual abuse as a violation of equality rights, pioneering the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination in employment and education; with Andrea Dworkin, she recognized the harms of pornography as civil rights violations and proposed the Swedish Model to abolish prostitution. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, MacKinnon, along with her co-counsel, won a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic under the Alien Tort Act, the first recognition of rape as an act of genocide. She works with ERA Coalition and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).

From the 2013 PBS Documentary “Makers: Women Who Make America”, examines how women have helped shape America over the past 150 years, striving for a full and fair share of political power and economic opportunity.

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Catharine MacKinnon, Legal Professional & Activist
Interview Date: July 12, 2011

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:12 Childhood
02:52 Early interest in the law
05:43 Smith College
07:15 New Haven
11:44 Shining a light on sexual abuse
15:10 Yale Law School
17:04 Carmita Wood
22:18 Sexual Harassment of Working Women
30:34 Fighting sexual harassment in the courts
41:49 Making a case against pornography
45:58 Countering objections
50:03 Fighting genocide in the courts
01:04:34 Practical politics
01:06:09 The women’s movement
01:09:12 Source of motivation
01:11:05 A life of service

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