Historical Blips
Earlier this week I listened to a talk given by the New York Times reporters who broke the Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, and other recent sexual harassment stories. During the first part of the talk, Emily Steel, who wrote the stories about O’Reilly, talked about her surprise as a young reporter at discovering how blatant and pervasive casual harassment was in workplaces.
“It’s really hard for women our age,” the 33-year-old Steel said. “We grew up thinking that everything had been kind of solved and fixed — that we’d be paid the same as men, that we’d be promoted the same as men. And now everybody’s just kind of realizing that nothing has changed as much as we were promised.”
I cried when I heard that. I am 58 — almost a quarter of a century older than Steel. Like her, I grew up thinking women had every bit as much right to a full professional life as men. My mother was a lawyer, and women’s marches were practically old hat when I was in high school. I just assumed that, by the time I entered the work force in the 1980s, I could expect the same treatment as any man.
Of course, that isn’t what I got. I was never overtly abused, like many of the courageous women who have come forward this year. No one ever threatened or seriously bullied me, and no one asked for sexual favors, at least not explicitly. But there were plenty of quiet come-ons, some implicit and some unmistakable. And then there were all the weird, creepy, uncomfortable moments, like the afternoon when my editor “joked” that I should sit on his lap when I came by his office, or the time when a glib young executive in a media company pushed the mute button during a conference call and smugly informed the rest of us sitting around the table — me and three men in their twenties and thirties — that he was “squeezing” the man we were talking to “by the balls.”
So obviously we hadn’t solved all those issues during my early years in the work force, which I had long ago accepted, if reluctantly. But listening to Emily Steel, it truly crushed me that a woman almost 25 years younger than I am could have been similarly disillusioned by her experience. Had nothing at all changed during all that time? Did Anita Hill, opening herself to patronizing ridicule by the aging white men of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, have so little lasting impact?
It has been heartening to see the national reckoning taking place around workplace abuse and harassment these last months. It’s astonishing to witness the power of this rolling wave of pent-up anger, after so much time when women seemed to have no voice at all. But I confess it leaves me unsettled and anxious. There is something scary about any movement that leaves so little room for analysis or careful thinking; as satisfying as it is to watch abusive, arrogant men get what they have long deserved, there’s no denying that it all smacks far too much of mob justice. There is something hypocritical about a group of people who would normally profess their allegiance to due process pushing forward with a process that offers no deliberation at all.
And here’s the really scary thing. What if this is just another, albeit far larger, Anita Hill moment — a surge of awareness that seems to change the landscape permanently, only to fade into yet another small historical blip? There have been all too many times already when we thought change had finally arrived, only to find the status quo closing over it as though it never happened. I can’t help worrying that, in another few years, I will see my daughter emerge from her first few workplace experiences saying, “I really thought all those problems had finally been settled.”
