50 tiMe September 30, 2019
Women have long been compelled
to share their most private moments in
order to convince others of their human-
ity. But in recent years, as we’ve peered
into an uncertain future and need only
pull out our phones to see highly per-
sonal warnings of the stakes, everything
seems amplified. The waves of stories,
put forth in tweets and speeches, tes-
timony and essays, have felt incessant,
each crashing down upon us with little
chance to breathe before the next one.
As more men, including the President
of the United States, have been publicly
accused of assault and misconduct, and
more states have passed laws that restrict
our abilities to make decisions about our
own health care, women have been re-
peatedly reminded of this country’s dis-
regard for our bodily autonomy and indif-
ference to the reality of our lives. And so
we come forward, again and again, to put
a human face on situations that are all too
often discussed in the abstract. We make
public what was once private, absorbing
the pain of others, enduring the backlash
for having made choices about our bodies
or having had things done to our bodies
that we did not consent to.
We share and share and share. We offer
up our experiences for mass consump-
tion, hoping that maybe this will be the
time we break through. But does any of
it make a difference?
“I am here today not because I want
to be. I am terrified. I am here because I
believe it is my civic duty to tell you what
happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh
and I were in high school,” Ford said in
her opening statement before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. She looked so tired
sitting there, her only request caffeine,
but she remained calm as she recounted
each detail of the night that has haunted
her for decades. (Kavanaugh has denied
the allegation.)
Ford had tried to keep her story pri-
vate. She had reached out to an elected
official in a confidential letter. But when
her allegation leaked to the media, she
decided she should be the one to tell her
story. Now she was sitting in front of a
panel of politicians, who were frowning,
judging, as she excavated her trauma for
an unforgiving and violent nation. In the
end, the political process ran right over
her, as if she were a speed bump, nothing
more than an annoying slowdown on the
march of a patriarchal agenda.
Nearly three decades earlier, in 1991,
Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas, then
a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually ha-
rassing her when he worked as her super-
visor. “It would have been more comfort-
able to remain silent,” she told Congress.
“But when I was asked by a representa-
tive of this committee to report my expe-
rience, I felt that I had to tell the truth.”
Thomas, who has denied the allegation,
has now been on the court for 28 years.
How many stories does it take? How
many voices do we need? How many more
traumas do we have to debate until some-
one listens? How long until society recog-
nizes that women are the authorities of
our own experiences?
This struggle is not new, nor is it exclu-
sive to cisgender women. Anyone who has
traditionally been barred from or under-
represented in political power—that is,
anyone who is not a cisgender, white, het-
erosexual, able-bodied man—has had to
turn themselves inside out to prove them-
selves worthy of being listened to. In the
19th century, former slaves like Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs presented
unvarnished accounts of the cruelty they
experienced. Their fight to have their
humanity recognized is one that has con-
tinued for people of color to this day. In
1977, Audre Lorde, a black lesbian poet,
gave a speech at the Modern Language
Association’s “Lesbian and Literature”
panel, saying, “I have come to believe
over and over again that what is most
important to me must be spoken, made
verbal and shared, even at the risk of hav-
ing it bruised or misunderstood. That the
speaking profits me, beyond any other ef-
fect.” She went on to challenge her audi-
ence: “What do you need to say? What are
the tyrannies you swallow day by day and
attempt to make your own, until you will
sicken and die of them, still in silence?”In recent years, young immigrants have
opened up about their lives despite the
risk that they could be forced to leave the
country they call home. When Larissa
Martinez revealed her undocumented
status in her 2016 valedictorian speech
at her Texas high school, she explained,
“This might be my only chance to convey
the truth to all of you that undocumented
immigrants are people too.”
We are all people. Some of us just have
to make the case for this fact, while oth-
ers get to live their lives as the societal
default. It’s been that way since at least the
days of ancient Rome, when women could
not vote or hold political office and were
excluded from speaking out on the Senate
floor. The only time a woman was allowed
to speak in Roman life was as a victim, a
martyr or a protector of her family.
In the late 1960s, feminist groups
like the New York Radical Women and
the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union
began engaging in consciousness-raising,
in which they would meet to talk about
the sexism and patriarchal oppression
in their lives. As the conversations
moved from the private to the public,
women rallied around the idea that
the personal is political. In 1972, a year
before Roe v. Wade, 53 women—including
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Billie Jean King,
Judy Collins, Anaïs Nin, Gloria Steinem,WE ARE ALL PEOPLE. SOME
OF US JUST HAVE TO MAKE THE
CASE FOR THIS FACT, WHILE
OTHERS GET TO LIVE THEIR LIVES
AS THE SOCIETAL DEFAULT
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