Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
TRAILBLAZERS AND TWISTS TO #METOO ROAD
RECKONING: THE EPIC BATTLE AGAINST SEXUAL ABUSE AND HARASSMENT By Linda Hirshman
I’M WILLING to bet that millions of women remember one particular moment from the #MeToo firestorm.
Each one on her own came to a sudden realisation: Seeing powerful men being called out one after another, she shook herself, rubbed her eyes, turned to the lady in the next cubicle and said: “Wait a minute. Did I ever tell you about this thing the boss did?” Or she said, “Isn’t it messed up that we all know that that one manager is a creep, and no one is doing anything about it?”
And as it all sank in: “Wait – you mean we can complain about this?”
In my quieter moments, when I was limp from rage, another question came to me: How did we get here?
In Reckoning, Linda Hirshman tantalisingly offers to answer those questions. She starts in 1968 in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, with Ted Kennedy’s infamous car wreck that killed Mary Jo Kopechne, and journeys through a packed halfcentury of feminist history – the earliest harassment cases, Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the 2008 primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Donald Trump’s election, the #MeToo movement, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh – landing at the 2018 midterm elections.
Reckoning aims to be a cultural, political and legal history of all that. Which is a tall order for about
250 pages of text.
Hirshman, a retired philosophy professor and lawyer, accomplishes what seems to be her simplest goal: showing us that yes, many threads stretch from those early harassment cases through decades of tangled politics to today’s #MeToo movement and its impacts.
Hirshman weaves together a story of how harassment became A Thing and how society reached its recent #MeToo tipping point.
Reckoning is at its most satisfying when Hirshman tells stories that
2019 readers might not know, like the early, trailblazing cases brought by women of colour that set the stage for the harassment battles of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. One see how the same people, ideas and roadblocks pop up decade after decade.
For example, when the Supreme Court in 1986 heard a harassment case brought by Mechelle Vinson against the bank where she had worked, the head of the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Clarence Thomas, led the agency in opposing Vinson. And the same type of questions Vinson faced (Did she encourage the harassment? Was complaining about it a form of “revenge”?) would eventually be asked of Anita Hill in her harassment case against Thomas.
Hirshman gives concise explanations of complicated court cases, mixed liberally with ironydripping jokes, acid asides and grand pronouncements.
It becomes clear early that Hirshman as a narrator needs to be taken with a shaker or two of salt.
On the one hand, it can be charming when she gives you a conspiratorial nudge and lets you know what she thinks of a court ruling. On the other, that kind of nudging means Hirshman is not writing a detached, analytical view of history. She is biased towards many of the figures she writes about. For example, she is far more concerned with castigating Gloria Steinem and other 1990s feminists who stood behind Bill Clinton than with wrestling too hard with why mainstream feminism failed Monica Lewinsky (and how some feminists, in fact, sided with her).
That lack of authorial distance leads to some below-the-belt moments, as when Hirshman criticises Joe Biden’s performance as Senate Judiciary Committee chairperson in the HillThomas hearings. That is fair – today, many continue to criticise Biden’s handling of the hearings.
But Hirshman takes it further: “Biden considered himself a friend to women. He certainly had reason to be, since his whole life was made possible by women who had put his career first,” she tartly explains, before telling of how his sister and two wives devoted their time to helping him climb the ladder.
That might be true, but was it more true of Biden than of any of the other (many) men in the Senate at the time? Or did Hirshman decide to get in an extra dig at a senator she thinks failed feminists? The personal is political.
She gets offensive when, in a list of alleged harassers, she includes “wheelchair-user public radio host John Hockenberry”. (Hockenberry does use a wheelchair, but one wonders why Hirshman felt compelled to let us know.)
Her penchant for big statements also damages her credibility. She gives former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, who brought down Roger Ailes by recording his advances on her smartphone, a dubious place in the pantheon of history: “Every social movement, however incremental, passes inflection points. Rosa Parks on the bus. ‘The Feminine Mystique’. Stonewall. Gretchen Carlson turned on her iPhone.”
Taken together, the barbs and overstatements make one wonder if attempts at wicked humour and theorising win out over perspective.
For example, why was Carlson the inflection point and not, say, the women who accused Bill Cosby nearly a year before Carlson filed her suit? Did Cosby’s dozens of accusers play into later #MeToo revelations at all? We don’t really find out; Cosby gets only a few passing mentions.
After finishing Reckoning, readers might have more questions than they did going in. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time until scholars have enough distance to see #MeToo clearly.
Until then, readers might be best served to plough through Hirshman’s text and study the endnotes. The questions women asked themselves in 2017 had been asked before, after all, as when 1990s women suddenly realised that they, too, could complain about harassment.
Hirshman knows this – she cites a selection of books and articles from other confusing times for American women: Susan Faludi’s Backlash
(1991) and Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer’s Strange Justice (1994) stand out. Readers left asking how we got here might do best to add those books to their bedside tables.