PERSPECTIVE ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS : Media Circuses Make Things Worse

When William Kennedy Smith’s accuser came forward last spring, many women’s rights advocates argued that a public airing of the complicated issue of date rape would lead to a broad challenge by American women to patriarchal power.

As they did during the Hill-Thomas episode, many insisted that even if the victim did not prevail in the courtroom, this newly anointed icon of feminism would be victorious in the court of public opinion. Hearing these harrowing stories, they said, women would get angry. And that anger would propel them into the voting booths to elect more women; they would flood the lines of congressional representatives in support of progressive legislation and be encouraged to participate in and contribute to feminist organizations.

But if the disturbing verdict in the Smith trial proves anything, it is the limits of this kind of magical political thinking. In both the Thomas and Smith cases, the nation heard plenty about the problems of women as victims of male power. But strategies of social change that depend on the media, the courts and the courageous actions of lone individuals disconnected from any larger social movement rarely encourage the kind of citizenship necessary to transform our world.

Almost as soon as the Thomas hearings were over, for example, Congress passed a much-weakened Family and Medical Leave Act that, even in its enfeebled state, lacked the votes required to override a certain presidential veto. Female congressional representatives complained that there was nary a peep from the women voters who so desperately need this legislation that would merely enable workers to take unpaid leave for family illness or birth of a child. Similarly, women did not turn out in droves to vote in the November elections to demonstrate their political commitment or clout.

A major problem with relying on the media or the legal system to promote an important public issue is that both will inevitably focus on individuals. But, like most human beings, these individuals are often flawed.

In the Smith case, the accuser was as concerned with protecting her anonymity as with pursuing justice. And this had far-reaching consequences, not only for her but for all women. The Kennedys were able to dominate the media with consistent images of privileged, powerful, confident men and, as usual, one dutiful Kennedy woman--the accused’s loyal and most likely suffering mother.

The accuser fought with one hand tied behind her back. She became quite literally invisible in the media’s pretrial coverage. And on the stand she was nameless and faceless--every woman or any woman--which is exactly how Will Smith, in his testimony, seemed to describe her. Her choice of anonymity, understandable as it was, deprived the public of a victim with a meaningful identity. Human beings who look to facial expression to confirm judgments about truth-telling and want someone who can look them straight in the eye and say “this is what happened to me” heard instead a disembodied voice speaking from the witness stand.

In the Anita Hill case we had a victim who did, finally, look people in the face--but only after keeping silent for 10 long years. Although some women, and men, could understand her ambivalence about speaking out publicly, the majority could not. That’s because moral ambivalence and complexity--which we all, in fact, experience in our private lives--are not admissible in public dramas where the protagonists are expected to fight clear-cut struggles of good against evil.

It’s hardly surprising that most women watching such modern media spectaculars become more alienated than angry, more apathetic than active. What they have just learned is that they can’t depend on their frightened, faltering sisters and that going it alone against male power seems to do little but fuel men’s anger and arrogance.

What American women need today is an organized, mass social movement where they can work together to forge a common moral vision and the political program necessary to achieve it. This kind of social movement will not be organized, or even promoted, by the American media or legal system. It will be organized, as all social movements are, by dedicated women and men who will--over the very long term--meet in small groups in their communities and workplaces, knock on doors to initiate conversations with friends and neighbors and make phone calls to political representatives. They will raise money, orchestrate protests and marches when going through the proper channels fails, themselves become candidates for political office in local, state and national elections, and disregard the media and the courts when they ignore, caricature or batter them.

Yes, all this takes time and enormous individual and collective fortitude. But if women do not once again undertake the often tedious and always arduous job of political organizing, then we can resign ourselves to endless episodes of these horrifying sexual soap operas.