The breadth of this problem extends not only across industry sectors, but also across time. Sexual harassment was considered an offense two millennia ago in ancient Rome; in the U.S., workplace sexual harassment has been illegal since the enactment of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But even before Title VII, the American public had a taste of the interplay between power and sex through one of its most famous icons, Marilyn Monroe. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926, Marilyn Monroe was the most popular sex symbol of the 1950s. The complex relationship between sex and power manifested itself both in her personal life – from multiple marriages to highly visible and powerful men, to her well-known affair with President John F. Kennedy – and in her professional life: sexuality was a theme in many of her movies, but it also influenced her career in ways that are eerily similar to the stories we are hearing through the #MeToo movement.

In fact, it was a young 27-year-old Monroe who went on record in 1953 with a story titled “Wolves I have known” that appeared in the January issue of Motion Picture and Television Magazine, in which she described patterns of sexual harassment that have been well-known for as long as Hollywood has existed, and that are virtually identical to the stories we are hearing today.

The story of Marilyn Monroe reaches beyond the entertainment industry, touching on a number of uncomfortable themes that are all too familiar: disrespect, abuse and harassment, and the havoc that these behaviors wreak on the emotional, physical and professional wellbeing of women in the workforce. Whether you are a history buff, a movie aficionado, or simply someone who wants to gain an historical perspective on issues that plague today’s professional women – from pay gap to imposter syndrome – you might enjoy reading the book Blonde, published 18 years ago by award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Blonde is a Marilyn Monroe biography cast as a novel, which has been described as “perhaps the most ferocious fictional treatise ever written on the uninhabitable grotesqueness of femininity.”