Taking Back the Whole Night

This has been a strange month for women's issues. President Clinton, arguably the president most favorable to women's rights, the most supportive of promoting equality between the sexes and the most connected to feminist organizations and initiatives, may sadly be remembered as the President who most effectively undermined those very pursuits.

This past week, U.S. District Court judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed Paula Jones' sexual harassment case on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to go to trial. According to Judge Wright, Jones' claims of the "hostility and animus" she felt from her supervisors did not demonstrate sexual harassment.

The great irony is that this situation has given conservative groups a chance to come out strongly in favor of what appear to be women's rights. Laura Mansnerus, writing for the New York Times Week in Review this week, reports that John Whitehead, president of the conservative group that pays Jones' attorneys, argued in traditional feminist language: "Is this judge saying that a man can expose himself to a woman, ask for oral sex and put his hand up her crotch and all the while she is saying no, that a woman would have no recourse in such a situation?"

Whitehead is on target. Nominally, there is legal recourse to deal with just such a scenario. The Supreme Court decided in a landmark case in 1986 that hostile working environments constitute sexual harassment. However, at the same time, as Mansnerus argues, the legal language for sexual harassment is vague and flexible and open to political vicissitudes. Judge Wright dismissed Jones' claim in part because of Wright's stringent definition of the offense of "outrage," which Jones claims she suffered. Wright argued that "outrage" is "emotional distress so severe that no reasonable person could be expected to endure it." Had the definition been broader, perhaps Jones' experiences would have been sufficient to bring the case to court.

As the ambiguities in the legal lexicon of sexual harassment indicate, despite the finality of Wright's decision, the more salient issues of the case remain undecided.

The legal standing of women claiming to have been sexually harassed and the validity with which our legal system and our culture at large treat claims of sexual harassment continue to be contested areas.

It is against this background that Take Back the Night (TBTN) enters the stage, here at Harvard and across the nation. Observed April 19-25, TBTN is a national attempt to bring to light issues of violence against women. This year at Harvard, though, TBTN, is taking on a broader focus. According to Talya Weisbard '00, co-chair of TBTN, she and others involved in planning the week-long event decided to "broaden the mission to include other women's issues and to plan events that empower women and help women feel strong." In the minutes from their planning meeting, TBTN was described as focusing on helping women to feel safe on several levels beyond the purely physical: safe with one's self; safe in interpersonal relationships; and safe in the community.

This multi-tiered conception of TBTN manifests itself in programs that focus on women in the work force and tenuring practices at Harvard, in programs focused on violence to the self, particularly an eat-in sponsored by ECHO about women and body image, and in women's empowerment, most literally dealt with through a self-defense workshop for women.

This year's TBTN planning committee is unique not only for its broader focus, but also for the composition of its membership. For the first time in the memory of its chairs, the committee was one-fifth male (six out of 30 members). As these numbers indicate and as the programs reflect, issues of physical violence are increasingly entertained in the public domain and represent issues of concern for all people, not merely a small group of women.

The broader vision of TBTN mirrors some of the questions that the Paula Jones case has brought to national attention. Sexual harassment, as the blurred borders and uncertain legal language testify, is a murky area that is profoundly affected by more than narrow descriptions of physical violence. If we are to create an effective, compassionate and just system with which to deal with sexual violence of all kinds, then the broader implications and manifestations of physical violence must be addressed.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott '98 is a social studies concentrator in House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.