A Rose By Any Other Name Might Smell as Sweet, But it Wouldn't Come in Dozens on Valentine's Day: How Sexual Harassment Got Its Name

Abstract

Language can never pin down slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable. Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 The story goes like this: October 1991, a New York woman heard some lewd comments as she was walking by a crew of construction workers, comments which were directed at her. She immediately found a police officer and brought the officer back to the scene. As the two approached the work site, the offenders ran off but the rest of the crew was questioned, and gave the officer the names of the men who had fled. The most important element in this story is the temporal aspect: After October 1991.... Had the story taken place before October 1991, the results would have likely been quite different; when questioned afterwards as to why she handled the situation the way she did, the New York woman claimed she did it because of Anita Hill. This story, perhaps an urban legend, is unsubstantiated. It was one of the many stories that circulated during and after the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Americans spent the evenings glued to the TV set, watching the soap opera unfold as ratings of CNN and others who would carry the drama went through the roof Debates raged during the day about what had been televised the previous night. Many felt compelled to tell stories of their own experiences with sexual harassment, because for the first time, experiences like Anita Hill's were given credence in the national discourse. If nothing else, the Hill/Thomas hearings served as a means to define sexual harassment. Others felt compelled to check their own behavior, confused, perhaps, by what might be construed as a redefinition of proper decorum in the workplace. A frantic scrambling took place that month-regardless of the outcome of the debate, people were eager to understand what the hearings meant culturally, and what they would mean for each personally. The story of the woman from New York provides an excellent example of how the Hill/Thomas narrative worked its way into the lives of average Americans. It is the classic constructionworkers-yell-cat-calls-at-woman story, but with a surprise ending. Because of a story, the woman from New York changed her behavior, thusly changing her story. This engendering process defines narrative argumentation. In this paper, I will explore narration as argument, using the Hill/Thomas hearings as the narrative, particularly the opening statements, Hill's substantive claims of sexual harassment, and Thomas' rebuttal to these charges as he is questioned afterwards (and aided substantially in his argument by senator Orrin Hatch). In understanding the Hill/Thomas hearings as narrative, I step outside the bounds of traditionally defined stories, exploring the no-man's-land between reality and fiction. We will come to a new understanding, hopefully, of what the hearings meant: rather than asking, Who won?, we will explore the way our culture might read the issues that appeared in the text of the hearings. It is understood from the study of psychology that processing and making use of narrative is one of the most basic functions of social understanding (Bruner 17). Perhaps it is our first epistemology; when we are young, we act primarily based on the experiences of others. Children participate in the belief that they must eat their broccoli, for example, because they want to grow up to be big and strong, like mommy and daddy. We process stories in general, but specifically the stories of others, in order to make decisions in our own lives. Novelist Robert Stone, in an address on the art of political writing, argues: Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity; it's almost as necessary as bread. We can't imagine ourselves without it. The self is a story: our individual, brief place in history is compounded of stories-stories that we shape inwardly and outwardly to make them more agreeable and hence more useful (29-30). …