In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (46 page)

Waverly Place
, my roman à clef of a classic batterer and the narcissistic woman who fell under his sway, was published one year after I saw that first news report, during Joel Steinberg’s trial but before his sentencing for second-degree murder. A new team at
Ms
. led by the Australian writer Anne Summers urged me to write an article about the case, feeling as I did that Hedda bore a serious share of responsibility for Lisa’s death. We agreed it was time to stop excusing the behavior of
all battered women by claiming each one was a helpless victim, a politically correct but, to our minds, a psychologically and morally untenable stance that damaged the movement’s credibility. Furthermore, it was sending the wrong message to women in abusive relationships who needed to break free. Nussbaum’s evasive testimony for the prosecution, which she gave in exchange for immunity, served only to strengthen my views, so when
The New York Times
asked me to write a short essay defining her moral and criminal accountability, I was glad to comply in that venue as well.

Enraged battered-women’s advocates saw
my opinions in
The Times
and
Ms
. as a stab in the back to the movement. A pro-Hedda petition was circulated, and an acrimonious dialogue, feminist against feminist, was played out on
Nightline
and
Oprah
. Gloria Steinem addressed a pro-Hedda rally on the steps of the criminal court building, and the new team at
Ms
. capitulated, adding their names to the Hedda petition and printing a few self-serving words from Nussbaum in a subsequent issue.

The Hedda controversy seems very long ago to me now, but some of my movement friendships never recovered from the debate.

ITS NAME IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT

As the silence on rape and battery gave way to a new awareness, sexual harassment in the workplace was named and launched as yet another urgent feminist cause. Narratives explaining how we got here from there are seldom tidy, for new ideas usually reach for the light simultaneously in many places, but the origins of this particular breakthrough are ineluctably precise. Its opening salvos were sounded in Ithaca, New York, in 1975, on Cornell University’s hilly, tree-lined campus.

In one of many responses to a militant decade,
Cornell had created a program called Human Affairs to bridge the gap between the privileged Ivy League school and the surrounding community. Teachers from nonacademic backgrounds were hired to initiate fieldwork and conduct seminars in such gritty problems as prison reform and urban redevelopment. The women’s section was a late addition, an afterthought really, and the three friends who got it moving were lesbian feminists with a strong labor orientation. “We saw ourselves as Saul Alinsky–style community organizers,” says Karen Sauvigne, who had trained with the Quakers and worked for the ACLU.

Lin Farley established the feminist beachhead at Human Affairs with a seminar on “women and work” in 1974. She was able to bring in Karen Sauvigne and Susan Meyer the following January when the two recruits, then lovers and partners, agreed to share one job line.
Meyer, an antiwar activist with SDS in Ann Arbor during her student days, had been in the
Rat
collective. Farley, who’d worked for a while as an Associated Press reporter, had testified at the 1971 New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape. Her account had been so vivid that I’d included an excerpt in
Against Our Will:
“Did you ever see a rabbit stuck in the glare of your headlights when you were going down a road at night? Transfixed, like it knew it was going to get it—that’s what happened.” Sauvigne was in a NYRF consciousness-raising group during the hectic time when she, Meyer, and Farley were
organizing for Lesbian Feminist Liberation in its break from the Gay Activist Alliance. At Cornell all the strands of the friends’ political work were to come together.

One afternoon a former university employee sought out Lin Farley to ask for her help.
Carmita Wood, age forty-four, born and raised in the apple orchard region of Lake Cayuga, and the sole support of two of her children, had worked for eight years in Cornell’s department of nuclear physics, advancing from lab assistant to a desk job handling administrative chores. Wood did not know why she had been singled out, or indeed if she had been singled out, but a distinguished professor seemed unable to keep his hands off her.

As
Wood told the story, the eminent man would jiggle his crotch when he stood near her desk and looked at his mail, or he’d deliberately brush against her breasts while reaching for some papers. One night as the lab workers were leaving their annual Christmas party, he cornered her in the elevator and planted some unwanted kisses on her mouth. After the Christmas party incident, Carmita Wood went out of her way to use the stairs in the lab building in order to avoid a repeat encounter, but the stress of the furtive molestations and her efforts to keep the scientist at a distance while maintaining cordial relations with his wife, whom she liked, brought on a host of physical symptoms. Wood developed chronic back and neck pains. Her right thumb tingled and grew numb. She requested a transfer to another department, and when it didn’t come through, she quit. She walked out the door and went to Florida for some rest and recuperation. Upon her return she applied for unemployment insurance. When the claims investigator asked why she had left her job after eight years, Wood was at a loss to
describe the hateful episodes. She was ashamed and embarrassed. Under prodding—the blank on the form needed to be filled in—she answered that her reasons had been personal. Her claim for unemployment benefits was denied.

“Lin’s students had been talking in her seminar about the unwanted sexual advances they’d encountered on their summer jobs,” Sauvigne relates. “And then Carmita Wood comes in and tells Lin
her
story. We realized that to a person, every one of us—the women on staff, Carmita, the students—had had an experience like this at some point, you know? And none of us had ever told anyone before. It was one of those
click, aha!
moments, a profound revelation.”

The women had their issue. Meyer located two feminist lawyers in Syracuse, Susan Horn and Maurie Heins, to take on Carmita Wood’s unemployment insurance appeal. “And then, because we were Alinsky-style labor organizers who had come out of Radical Feminists,” Sauvigne reports, “we decided that we also had to hold a speak-out in order to break the silence about this.”

The “this” they were going to break the silence about had no name. “Eight of us were sitting in an office of Human Affairs,” Sauvigne remembers, “brainstorming about what we were going to write on the posters for our speak-out. We were referring to it as ‘sexual intimidation,’ ‘sexual coercion,’ ‘sexual exploitation on the job.’ None of those names seemed quite right. We wanted something that embraced a whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent behaviors. Somebody came up with ‘harassment.’
Sexual harassment!
Instantly we agreed. That’s what it was.”

In line with their mission at Human Affairs, the leaders did not want the speak-out to be “just a Cornell event” dominated by students. Calling themselves Working Women United, they reached out to nearby Ithaca College, set their alarms at 5:30
A.M.
to leaflet at the town’s two big factories, Ithaca Gun and Morse Chain, and surreptitiously deposited stacks of flyers at the town’s banks. Letters announcing their campaign were mailed to eighty women lawyers and law students on one of Sauvigne’s national lists. The
Ithaca Journal
and two local radio stations ran stories about Carmita Wood’s unemployment insurance appeal and the upcoming speak-out on sexual harassment. Because of
the sensitive nature of the accusations, no one dared utter the name of the professor, but that didn’t matter. The pioneer work in naming sexual harassment already had surpassed the details of one case.

Saturday afternoon, May 4, 1975, was a typically rainy spring day in Tompkins County. The organizers were ecstatic as nearly three hundred women carrying ponchos and umbrellas crowded into the downtown Greater Ithaca Activities Center for the
first speak-out in the world on sexual harassment. Carmita Wood was sitting up front with her adult daughter Angela, who’d come down from Buffalo to support her mother and to testify about her own experiences with sexual harassment on the job. Connie Korbel, who worked in Cornell’s department of personnel, was there for her friend Carm, and to tell of work-related harassment she, too, had suffered. “There’s lots of things that have happened on my jobs that I’ve never told anyone,” Korbel said at the microphone. “Each single individual piece maybe didn’t seem that important, but when you start thinking about them over your lifetime of work, you begin to wonder, why did this have to happen to me?”

Three waitresses spoke of their harassment by customers and bosses. “What are the statistics for waitresses?” one asked. “I’d say one hundred percent.” A mailroom clerk, a factory shop steward, a secretary, an assistant professor, and an apprentice filmmaker took the microphone to add their stories. The inappropriate male behavior in the workplace revealed at the speak-out ran the gamut: crude propositions to barter sex for employment, physical overtures and masturbatory displays, verbal abuse and hostile threats that appeared patently designed to intimidate a woman and drive her out of her job.

Before everyone left to go home, Susan Meyer handed out Working Women United questionnaires. A striking 70 percent of the respondents, admittedly self-selected, had experienced some form of sexual harassment at work. Unsurprisingly, most of the women had not reported the incidents. They didn’t want to make waves and lose their jobs; they feared their complaints would be dismissed as trivial; they’d agonized that the leering, pinching, and behind-patting, the sneaky feels and verbal propositions, were things a mature, “together” person should be able to handle.

Thanks to events that had been set in motion a month before the
Ithaca speak-out, the women’s testimony that day would receive national attention. Lin Farley had learned that Eleanor Holmes Norton, New York City’s Commissioner on Human Rights, was conducting hearings on patterns of discrimination faced by women in blue-collar and service-industry jobs. Seizing her opportunity, Farley had written to Norton brandishing her Cornell credentials and asking for a chance to testify. When her moment came, she half expected to be laughed out of the hearing room.

“
The titillation value of sexual harassment always was obvious to us,” Farley recalls. “When we leafleted outside the Ithaca factories, we were greeted by smirks and jokes. But Eleanor Holmes Norton treated the issue with dignity and great seriousness.” Norton, who had monitored protest demonstrations and arrests in the South for the civil rights movement while studying law at Yale, was an instinctive, gut feminist, particularly when the cause was work-related. She had taken the
Newsweek
women’s discrimination complaint back in 1969, pushing the researchers to the next level of militancy with her exhortation “Take off your gloves, ladies, take off your white gloves.” So when Farley, her voice high and quaking, outlined the dimensions of sexual harassment and its effect on the physical health and ambitions of women in the workforce, Eleanor Holmes Norton asked the right, approving questions.

Reporter Enid Nemy, who usually strolled the trendy beat of society and fashion, was covering the hearings for the Family/Style page of
The New York Times
, an odd assignment for her, but evidently someone higher up had decided that Commissioner Norton’s investigations were too “soft” for a business or labor reporter. Although she was not one of the paper’s vocal feminists, Nemy had no trouble spotting an original news story in sexual harassment. She persuaded her editor to send her to Ithaca for the May 4 speak-out, and did follow-up interviews between other assignments. The story took a long time to piece together. But when
it finally appeared in August 1975, “Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work” sprawled across the Family/Style page and got national syndication. Lin Farley’s list of intimidating behaviors appeared in the third paragraph: constant leering and ogling, pinching and squeezing, verbal sexual abuse, persistent
brushing against a woman’s body, catching a woman alone for forced sexual intimacies, outright sexual propositions backed by threat of losing a job, forced sexual relations.

“Nemy’s story put sexual harassment on the map,” Karen Sauvigne affirms. “Suddenly we had the authority of the
Times
behind us. We could point to it and say, Look, the
Times
says.… This may sound hard to believe, but we were still encountering resistance among some feminists. The first time we approached the Ms. Foundation for money, they turned us down. Later, of course, they were very helpful, but at the time, they told us that sexual harassment wasn’t a bread-and-butter issue because it was not about equal pay for equal work. We utterly failed to persuade them that women were losing their jobs over this, that sexual harassment contributed to the discouragement and dead-end nature of women’s careers.”

“Career Women Decry Sexual Harassment by Bosses and Clients” was
The Wall Street Journal
’s special angle for its readers in a
front-page feature in January 1976. The problem was murky and few corporations were taking it seriously, the
Journal
reported, but the EEOC was saying that sexual harassment was unlawful sex discrimination.
Redbook
, “the magazine for young mothers,” did the first national survey that year. Eighty-eight percent of the magazine’s nine thousand respondents had an incident to report. In June 1977, Letty Cottin Pogrebin used her column in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
to ask, “Why haven’t we heard more about this problem?”

That November,
Ms
. finally got its act together and ran freelancer Karen Lindsey’s cover story.
Mary Thom remembers the excitement as the editors readied their package, which noted the epidemic proportions of harassment on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations. The
Ms
. women held a speak-out-style press conference, which garnered a
second
Times
headline, “Women Tell of Sexual Harassment at Work.” Susan Meyer of Working Women United succinctly described the campaign’s status: “It’s where rape was five years ago.” By the end of the decade every women’s magazine had weighed in on the new issue.