Book Review/Heather Seggel

The Battle Continues

Have you seen the movie “Nine to Five”? I watched it a few years back after hearing someone say it held up well as a comedy. It does! Great cast, ebullient theme song, a lot of fun all around. What I didn’t know was that the movie was named after a union for clerical workers formed in 1973 by a clerk typist at Harvard, or that all the transgressions committed by the movie’s lecherous boss were experienced by working women who shared them in meetings that star and creator Jane Fonda or screenwriter Patricia Resnick attended. Packaged as a comedy so people might actually see it, the film strikes a powerful blow at a long-standing problem: the sexual harassment of working women. This is one of the happier stories in “Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Author Linda Hirshman finds plenty to celebrate over the course of the struggle, but it’s a long, grim road.

In the past Hirshman has written about topics like the path to LGBT rights and the unique friendship between Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and in those books she kept her own personality in check, carefully explaining legal decisions and following the story where it leads. The details of legal matters are important here — one of Ginsburg’s early legal decisions established a precedent that set the fight back rather than advancing it — but there’s also a more impassioned, personal writing style at play. Under the chapter subheading, “End Rape on Campus,” she immediately deadpans, “What a good idea,” before describing the movement that led to the film The Hunting Ground (if you haven’t seen it, seek it out. Many of the fragile gains made to ensure victims are heard and taken seriously are being attacked and eroded under Betsy DeVos). The film found an audience thanks to being distributed by Miramax, the high-meets-lowbrow magic factory helmed by Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein pops up throughout this book, as he was abusing his position to sexually assault women for decades. Hirshman will focus on an era, beginning with the civil rights legislation that sexual harassment law built upon, and there he’ll be, demanding a massage from yet another unwilling actress. Weinstein was ultimately taken down by the press—the story of the race to publish between The New Yorker and New York Times is both exciting and terribly frustrating to read. As the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements exposed the misdeeds of more powerful men, the press becomes a real hero in this story. When the law can’t touch you, Ronan Farrow may yet bring you to justice.

It was journalists who came in after Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court and, after meticulously following the details of both his and Anita Hill’s testimony, determined that he lied under oath, though it did not cost him the seat. The “year of the woman” in politics that ensued was a prelude to the blue tsunami that swelled in the wake of Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh. Both stories show how the response to a grave injustice can sometimes secure a measure of justice in unforeseen ways.

There’s a complex parsing of Hillary Clinton’s runs for office, and how her husband went from asset to anchor as our perceptions of sexual harassment have evolved. Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to answer for his conduct toward Monica Lewinsky is similar to Joe Biden repeating how he keeps meaning to apologize directly to Anita Hill for his grossly unfair treatment of her, while never actually doing the thing; Hirshman takes it as a measure of how the movement has succeeded that women are much less willing to stand for what they might once have turned the other cheek to.

An unlikely hero of this story is law professor and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. Reviled by many for what was seen as a stance in direct opposition to the sexual freedom enabled by Roe vs. Wade and easy access to birth control, Hirshman shows how many of her ideas led us to where we are today; she created the legal theory that sexual harassment of working women violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a critical shift. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were mocked and dismissed when they were creating new work, but it’s beginning to look as though history owes them both a rereading and an apology.

“Reckoning” opens with the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick to point out how often women are forced to choose between conservatives whose legislative agendas deny us basic equality and liberals whose conduct does not align with their purported beliefs. It appears that our true reckoning is happening, and will continue to do so, when we appear on more ballots ourselves.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2019

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