The World Split Open (37 page)

Like incest, wife-beating was another secret carefully hidden behind the charade of a happy marriage. It turned out that women had no particular proclivity for walking into doors, falling down stairs, or smashing their faces on the ground. Men from all classes and races slugged their
wives—when they drank too much, when their dinner arrived late, when they felt jealous, when they became impotent, when high on drugs, when in withdrawal, when the boss laid them off, when their job frustrated them. Typically, a man would later beg for forgiveness, but forgiveness seldom ended such domestic violence. Studies showed that violent men tended not to blame themselves but the women they lived with for provoking their rage and violence.
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Before the seventies, few women ever dared to admit that they had been beaten. The police, who regarded domestic violence as a private matter, rarely interfered. During the 1970s feminists renamed wife-beating—which sounded more like a traditional custom than a crime—“battering.” As the plight of battered women received growing attention, law enforcement officials—prodded by feminist activists—helped reframe domestic violence as a crime.
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Most Americans had a hard time grasping the reality of battered women. Why did they remain with abusive men? Why did they refuse to testify against them in court? Wasn't it their fault that the situation continued? Why didn't they just leave? No one had ever heard of “battered women's syndrome.” They didn't understand that violent husbands or boyfriends regularly stalked or hunted down women who fled their grasp and killed them and their children. They did not know that battered women generally had no safe refuge and no money with which to restart their lives.

Between 1974 and 1980, feminists created battered women's shelters all over the country. Brandishing the motto “We will not be beaten,” thousands of women activists, joined by social workers, created grassroots organizations that lobbied for social and legal reforms. By 1977, the phrase “battered woman” had entered public discourse. By 1982, feminists had established three hundred shelters and forty-eight state coalitions of service providers for battered women, while offering countless women refuge from violent men. In the process, they helped to redefine wife-beating as neither a custom nor a private matter, but as a felony.
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If homes were not always safe havens for women, neither was the workplace, where a boss might hold absolute power over a woman's livelihood. The idea that a man's sexual predatory habits on the job should be illegal had simply never occurred to most women. That's the way it was. When harassed, women tended to feel guilty, blame themselves, and wonder what they had done to deserve such attention. At first, no one even knew what to call this abuse of power, except perhaps sexual blackmail. In 1975, a group of women at Cornell University
banded together to expose the sexual behavior of a male professor and coined the term “sexual harassment.” Almost immediately, Nadine Taub and other feminist lawyers began to file suits using the term as well. In 1979, law professor Catharine MacKinnon's groundbreaking book
The Sexual Harassment of Working Women
publicized both the term and the way in which such male behavior prevented women from achieving true economic independence. As Susan Griffin had once argued that rape was a matter of power and control, so MacKinnon now argued that sexual harassment was also about power and control and constituted sex discrimination at work.
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Once named, sexual harassment seemed to be everywhere. Hollywood's faded casting couch was not the only site where sexual harassment occurred. At colleges and universities, male faculty sometimes demanded sexual favors from students in return for high grades or letters of recommendation. In business, men often made promotions contingent on a woman's willingness “to put out.” In factories, foremen gave special favors to women who treated them “right.”

In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission added sexual harassment to its “Guidelines on Discrimination.” Once unwelcome sexual advances were redefined as a violation of a woman's rights, working women could file grievances against their employers. As a result, men discovered that certain kinds of behavior were illegal, as well as unacceptable.

But change did not occur overnight. The good old days when men could abuse or harass women with impunity were fast disappearing. But a new national consensus had not been reached. When does “no” really mean “no”? Can and should a society legislate affairs of the heart? Men were confused and no longer knew how to behave around women. Women were baffled as well. And feminists vehemently disagreed whether new policies should
protect
women or
defend
their newfound sexual freedom.
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During the 1990s, the subject of appropriate sexual conduct suddenly burst into public consciousness in the form of national hearings, trials, and scandals. It wasn't until 1991, when Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated for a Supreme Court vacancy, that his former aide Anita Hill accused him of all kinds of sexual harassment. How was it possible to distinguish friendly flirtation on the job from a sexually hostile work environment? What evidence was necessary to prove sexual harassment?

When the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas, most Americans disbelieved Anita Hill's testimony. Yet, just one year later, a majority of
citizens had changed their minds and believed her. Why? Because the hearings spurred countless personal and formal debates about the nature of sexual harassment. Afterward, many women, both black and white, privately remembered and publicly recounted their own experiences of being sexually harassed.
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As a result, more men and women began to appreciate why a genuinely hostile work environment interfered with a woman's ability to support herself. Just four years later, the Senate forced Bob Packwood, one of its members accused of compulsive sexual harassment, to resign from office. Some of his colleagues, who now viewed him as an embarrassment, seemed downright eager, even desperate, to prove that yes, they had finally “gotten it.”

Through these widely publicized political soap operas, Americans began to learn about some of the “gender crimes” feminists had identified during the 1970s. In addition to the Clarence Thomas hearings (1991), the public followed the Navy's Tailhook sex scandal (1991), the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson date rape trials (1992), the Spur Posse sexual athleticism in Lakewood, California (1993), the trial that publicized the gang rape of a retarded girl in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1993, the furious debate over homosexuals in the military (1992-1996), the O. J. Simpson trial and verdict (1994-1995), and the Army's and Navy's scandalous sexual harassment incidents (1996—1997), all of which informed millions of Americans that some kinds of behavior were no longer socially acceptable. These media circuses gradually had a cumulative impact on American political culture. Although many of the accused were acquitted, the nation became immersed in debates over date rape, battering, and sexual harassment. Once hidden, these “sex crimes” now became part of common discourse, so common that they began to enter mainstream culture and politics.
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It took a while, but a majority of feminists eventually agreed that rape, incest, battering, and sexual harassment violated women's rights. But no such consensus existed about whether misconduct in the sex industry violated the rights of the women who worked as prostitutes or in the pornography industry. On the issue of prostitution, American feminists found it difficult if not impossible to agree whether they should protect
the rights of sex workers or simply abolish the industries that employed them.

In 1971, feminists convened a conference on prostitution in New York City. Kate Millett, who chronicled the conference in
The Prostitution Papers
(1971), described how “all hell broke loose—between the prostitutes and the movement.” Although skeptical, the prostitutes had come to the conference as working women, “in the life,” looking for support in a difficult and dangerous trade. They were not simply movement women who had once turned a trick or two. “They had a great deal to say,” reported Millett, “about the presumption of straight women who fancied they could debate, decide, or even discuss what was their situation and not ours. The first thing they could tell us—the message coming through a burst of understandable indignation—was that we were judgmental, meddlesome, and ignorant.” For some feminists, prostitution seemed like the quintessential exploitation of women. In the eyes of the disgusted prostitutes, the movement women reminded them of the middle-class wives and mothers who tried to drive them out of their neighborhoods.
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The gulf between prostitutes and movement women proved impassable. Both groups agreed that prostitution should be decriminalized, but for radically different reasons. Prostitutes demanded safer working conditions for an ongoing trade; feminists wanted to abolish prostitution altogether. Alix Kates Shulman recalled that after several prostitutes described the working conditions they wanted, “one feminist jumped onto the stage, and said, well, why are you prostitutes? Why aren't you making a living some other way? Like, as a file clerk.”
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Millett wrote:

In the interminable “just let me finish my point” vs. “Baby you don't know where it's at” that prolonged itself in doorways and staircases . . . we were at last becoming persons to each other. There was a gulf . . . but it was closing.

Or so Millett hoped. But the next day, the conference spiraled out of control. The prostitutes bristled at the day's program, titled “Towards the Elimination of Prostitution.” To add insult to injury, the panel of “experts” included not one prostitute. Millett reported that “a few prostitutes arrived late and after some hesitation, were allowed to sit on the platform. The panel then fell into ‘tedious bickering.' The audience, outraged by the growing chaos, began forming long lines to speak into
microphones.” Millett watched the conference disintegrate into accusations and recriminations:

Everyone talked. No one made any sense. Things rapidly degenerated into chaos. . . . Beyond the absurdly hypothetical threat posed by the term “elimination” . . . was the greater threat of adverse judgment by other women. For if large numbers of “straight” women congregate to agree that there is an absolute benefit in the elimination of prostitution—what does this convey to the prostitute? . . . that she is despised and rejected by her sister women. Never mind if this makes no sense—it was there like an edict upon the heart.

The more feminists argued, the more prostitutes viewed them as ignorant moralists. In the heat of the moment, some feminists revealed their real feelings of revulsion toward prostitution and then were shocked when pandemonium broke out. The shrillness of the organizers was matched by the even shriller shouts of the prostitutes.

The accusation so long buried in liberal good will or radical rhetoric—“You're selling it, I could too, but I won't”—was finally heard. Said out loud at last. The rejection and disapproval which the prostitutes have sensed from the beginning . . . is now present before us, a palpable force in the air. There is fighting now in earnest. Someone is struck, the act obscene, irreparable. Attempts at reconciliation are futile. . . . The afternoon is in shambles.

“It was simply too early,” Millett sadly concluded. Perhaps, but American feminists have a long history of lacking genuine empathy with prostitutes. During the first two decades of the century, feminists played a decisive role in ensuring that prostitution became illegal. Now, during the second wave of feminism, many feminists again found the idea of women selling sex unacceptable. The “whore stigma” scared many of them away. The sexual revolution had not erased memories of good and bad girls, especially for white middle-class women. But Flo Kennedy, one of the movement's sassiest, most outspoken veterans of the civil rights and women's movements, pointed out that “feminists always talk about prostitutes getting beaten up by the pimps, but statistically women get beaten up even more by their husbands.”
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In contrast to American feminists, Dutch and French activists created encounter groups with prostitutes, and in some European cities, feminists and prostitutes worked together in coalitions to improve the working conditions of sex workers. In America, the legacy of American Victorian values, as well as feminists' ambivalent attitudes toward the sexual revolution, combined to push prostitution to the bottom of the feminist agenda, a subject rarely raised except as an issue of “sexual slavery.”

Deeply disappointed, Millett wrote, “It may be that the West Coast will get it together before we do in the East.” She was right. In San Francisco, the flamboyant and politically astute Margo St. James, herself a former prostitute, organized a union of prostitutes in 1973 called COYOTE, an acronym that stood for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.” COYOTE successfully provided prostitutes with adequate counsel and persuaded public defenders to prosecute crimes that had actual victims. COYOTE also convinced some municipal judges to release prostitutes arrested on routine street sweeps on their own recognizance. In Seattle, Jennifer James, another former prostitute and advocate, pulled together a similar union. Over the decade, unions of prostitutes that sought decriminalization began appearing in major cities in Europe as well. Not surprisingly, only a few American feminists actively became involved in lending their support.

The subject of pornography polarized the women's movement much more than prostitution, turning friends into enemies, and persuading some outsiders that a feminist was just another name for a prude who wore sensible shoes. In the earliest years of the movement, feminists had felt queasy about denouncing pornography for fear of appearing “straight” and prudish. Robin Morgan recalled that “there was a time when rape and pornography were embarrassing issues even in the Women's Movement . . . such things were deplorable . . . but they had to be explored with a sophisticated snicker—not with outspoken fury.” Morgan's famous statement, “Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice,” captured an idea that would only grow in the movement—that the cultural dehumanization of the female body was a precondition for and invitation to commit violence against women.
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