On March 30, 1978, a jury was picked in the trial of a suit filed against a Detroit firm by a woman who claims she was fired because she refused to have sex with her boss. Attorneys for Mrs. Maxine Munford said it was the first sex discrimination case of its type to go to trial in the United States.
On her first day of work in 1976, Maxine Munford’s white boss asked her “if she would make love to a white man and if she would slap his face if he made a pass at her.” When she refused his advances, she was fired. .
A month later, she lost the case after a jury of four women and two men found for the company, saying they didn’t find Munford’s testimony credible. Munford happened to be an African American.
“I’m not sorry that I went through with it,” said Maxine Munford, 31, who filed the charges in a lawsuit. “I hope that (despite the loss) it will give other women some incentive . . . and let them know there are certain things that they don’t have to put up with.”
However, due to subsequent publicity, Munford’s charges against her boss would eventually lead to one of the first state laws against sexual harassment, passed in Michigan in 1980.
Carrie N. Baker, “Race, Class, and Sexual Harassment in the 1970s“, Feminist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 7-27
Battle Creek Enquirer, April 21, 1978