This is something that's hard to grasp in retrospect. I was sexually harassed as an undergrad, by which I mean things from a prof grabbing my breast at a party to another asking me to spend the summer with him. I was repulsed by this, but *we had no concept of 'sexual harassment at the time.*
The news coverage of the scandal was literally introducing the concept of “sexual harassment” to Americans and Biden and the rest of the Democrats were scrambling to get a grasp on it
I thought that what these professors did was vile, but it did not cross my mind that they were not just my personal cross to bear, a series of deeply unpleasant situations that I had to navigate.
There was no name for this. There was no understanding of it as a systemic problem.
You can talk theoretically about the difference it makes when you name something, the power language gives you, but this is the example that brought it home to me: It never occurred to me to REPORT the profs to anyone. It never occurred to me that there might be an administrative response.
Again, I just thought it was my own problem, which I had to navigate (and did.) (Note: ALL of these profs were either teaching a course I was enrolled in at the time, or in some other way assessing my work for grades.)
Once the concept of sexual harassment appeared, I thought: of course! This is OBVIOUSLY a systemic problem. Even I, who had the thoughts I'm talking about, find it hard to explain in retrospect why this didn't occur to me at the time.
But it didn't.
Looking back on what we felt the need to tolerate back then really is amazing. Like you, it would never have occurred to report a professor or a boss for (so called at the time) minor things. Also the anger directed at the women was something else.
When Packwood was forced to resign (I just looked up what he actually did, damn) I was friends with a lawyer who was ballistic at the women in Congress who held a press conference. He hated them for standing up for the victims.
Marital rape was legal in the US until the 1970s.
The modern idea of consent to sexual relations is perhaps 50 years old; previously it was not part of mainstream US culture.
Marital rape was legal in some parts of the US longer than that. The last vestiges of the "marital exception" in Washington State (for third-degree rape) were expunged only in 2013, thirty years after the marital exception for first- and second-degree rape was taken off the books in 1983.
It was endemic. We recently visited the Cheers bar & The Kid had no idea why we were geeking out so we started rewatching the show with him. It largely holds up (occasional homophobia or racism, but not often & we always discuss.)
However.
The CONSTANT sexual harassment of Diane is hard to watch.
One of my profs hit on every student in the major, often also putting his arm around them. No one ever reported it or thought to. He never did it to anyone more than once, no one took him up on it, and there were no repercussions for refusing him. It was just a rite of passage you knew to expect.
I was kicked out of my graduate program after refusing the advances of my thesis advisor, and the only official person I reported it to (the graduate advisor) turned it back on me: "Why did you choose him as your advisor?" Low point of my life, even though I'm glad now that I'm not in higher ed.
That's atrocious, I'm sorry. Your instincts are right, there are way too many abusive jerks in higher ed and they love to bully grad students and junior faculty. We all have stories I bet, though few as gruesome as yours.
Well, the whole Higher Ed business is a lot different now than it was when I was a student in the 80s. The jobs are not as good, and the professors don't get the same respect they used to. Many things have improved, but the quality of the job has declined, I think.
Some of the jobs are as good as ever. But the job market, at least in the humanities, has cratered, so going to grad school is a bit like playing the lottery.
I quit my major after being harassed by a prof. The hearings were on at the time, Hill was being ridiculed and dismissed. I saw that and didn't even try to report it.
oh, there would've been a response all right, an unforgettable one, sadly
I also never reported the faculty who harassed me. Today that seems inexplicable. How could I have allowed that to go on without even reporting them? But I would have been damaged by the report and nothing would have changed.
I recently read Salka Viertel’s memoir about stage life in interwar Germany and even she writing from the perspective of the early 60s(?) treated it like…bad weather, basically. Unpleasant but beyond anyone’s control.
First, I am so sorry this happened to you. Absolutely vile. Second I do want reiterate your point - there really was no readily available language to talk about this stuff, seeking recourse was not the “accepted” way to address these things (the “accepted” ways were of course rubbish)almost alien.
I don’t remember the specifics but I’m sure there are dozens of absolutely appalling quotes from members of that committee who were absolutely clueless about how things were shifting.
I know.
Another example was the time the second reader on my senior thesis asked me out to dinner. I know, now, that he did not intend sex for grades or any such thing, since I said no and got an A. But even then, I was furious on behalf of alternate me who did not dare to do that ...
And I definitely still know people — women who had long careers in academia — who would say things like “we dealt with it fine back then, this doesn’t need an institutional response.”
I'm an elder millennial, and my college class had some REAL divided feelings on whether "sex with a semi-lucid drunk person" counted as rape.
(You can imagine who was MOST vocal about their displeasure with considering drunk sex as rape)
