by Sady Doyle
What’s striking about Harriet Jacobs’s silence is that, in some ways, she sounds just like anyone. The levels of atrocity she saw and endured are unimaginable. She’s even clear, in her book, that some part of her pain may be unimaginable: No matter how open she is in telling her life story, she also tells us that no one can really know what she’s endured unless they have also been enslaved. And yet, when Jacobs demurs and protests that she doesn’t have it in her to write—that she can’t take criticism, that she’s not educated, that she’s not a real heroine, that she’d need to be more sympathetic to be worthy of a hearing—she sounds like any other woman I’ve known refusing to push herself out into the world.
But silence from within is not the whole story. Her silence was also practically, even legally, mandated by the culture she lived in. No one faced a higher, harder barrier to public speech than Jacobs did. For most of her life, she was legally barred from choosing a career, voting, deciding where to live, or even reading, let alone writing. Her silence was shared by millions of other women who were literally rendered property, whose bodies and suffering were commodified in the most literal and brutal way possible. They were seen, used, harmed, killed, but not heard. Because to make themselves heard would be to make themselves human.
Harriet Jacobs was able to break that silence—she was able to respond to Julia Tyler. It was an audacious act. But it was also a moment when the safety afforded by silence was outweighed by the threat of not speaking. Tyler was telling the world that slavery was good for women; Tyler was wrong; if Jacobs didn’t say something, it was entirely possible that Tyler would get to keep being wrong, and make the world wrong in her image.
Which is to say, Jacobs was able to get to the other side of silence by realizing exactly what makes it insupportable: If you don’t tell people who you are and what you know, other people will be able to tell the world who you are for you. And, if it pleases them, they will be able to lie.
Of course, Jacobs also experienced silence’s cruelest trick: Even if you do convince yourself to speak, someone else has to agree to listen to you. If they deny you, silence comes back. And it will swallow you whole.
•
In the early twenty-first century, the ban on women’s public speech has seemingly been broken. Women are best-selling authors, world leaders, singer-songwriters, film directors, TED Talk–givers; women, even when they have accomplished none of the above, are typically connected to social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, which allow them to broadcast their written speech (or, in the case of YouTube videos, their actual speech) to a national or international audience. It is easy to assume that the fight is over; that women can take their right to a voice for granted.
Easy, but unwise. Even now, there are strange discrepancies and imbalances in women’s public speech as compared to men’s. We hear, for example, about “imposter syndrome,” the strangely common belief among high-achieving women that they don’t actually deserve any of their success. We also hear about the “confidence gap,” the fact that women are statistically far less likely to apply for jobs or ask for raises than men are. In politics, this is called the “ambition gap,” and it supposedly accounts for the fact that men are vastly overrepresented in government; men are 80 percent of the U.S. Congress, and only 49 percent of the U.S. population. One 2001 study found that women are twice as likely as men to say they are “not at all qualified” to run for political office—and that men are 60 percent more likely to rate themselves as “very qualified” to do so.
Then, there are the everyday aggressions that women report when exercising their voices. There is the Internet-neologized phenomenon of “mansplaining” (a man explaining something to a woman that she already knows, sometimes better than he does). There is the strange fact that women’s actual voices tend to be viewed as somehow more objectionable than men’s. Women are also stereotyped as the more talkative gender, despite the fact that research suggests men talk more than women do; when men and women are deliberately given equal speaking time at a public event or discussion, the women are perceived to have talked more than the men, simply because equally distributed speech is so rare that it still feels somehow unnatural.
Speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me in particular: Scratch the surface, and plenty of men are still willing to believe or repeat that millennia-old declaration. And, puzzlingly, women are still likely to agree with them. On some basic level, silence is still the default state of female existence. Though the world has changed to the point that we can no longer prevent women from speaking—women are technically allowed to read, write, hold jobs, get into an argument with the neighbors without being waterboarded for it—there are still many, many ways that the world convinces women to steal speech from themselves.
Enforcing silence is easy. All you have to do is make it feel like the safest option. You can, for example, make speaking as unpleasant as possible, by creating an anonymous social media account to flood women with virulent personal criticism, sexual harassment, and threats. You can talk over women, or talk down to them, until they begin to doubt that they have anything worthwhile to say. You can encourage men’s speech, and ignore women’s, so that women will get the message that they are taking up too much room, and contributing too little value. You can nitpick a woman’s actual voice—the way she writes, her grammar, her tone, her register, her accent—until she honestly believes she’s bad at talking, and spends more time trying to sound “better” than thinking about what she wants to say.
And if a woman somehow makes it past all this, you can humiliate her anyway. It’s easy to bemoan the gaps in women’s confidence, or women’s ambition; to blame women for being afraid to make themselves heard. But, if women believe they have more to lose than men from being visible, they’re right. They do. Success, or even the visible attempt to succeed, is in fact dangerous for women. And after a lifetime spent in trainwreck culture—a life spent watching the most beautiful, lucky, wealthy, successful women in the world reduced to deformed idiot hags in the media, and battered back into silence and obscurity through the sheer force of public disdain—women may not be able to see “being heard” as a good thing in itself. We understand, on some level, that success can be a gateway to another, more profound, more painful kind of failure.
We never stopped publicly exhibiting the mentally ill for titillation. We never stopped punishing mouthy women. Silence is still seductive, and still enforced. Until that changes, our history will be littered with blank spaces and disappearing acts—not only the girls who fell silent, or the girls who vanished, but the women who were never there at all.
6
SPEAK UP
In June 2007, Britney Spears published a blog post (title: “You’ll Never See It My Way, Because You’re Not Me”) asking her fans to choose the title of her new album. Here were the candidates:
Dignity
Down Boy
Integrity
OMG Is Like Lindsay Lohan OK Like
What If the Joke Is on You
The album wound up being called Blackout. In a classic Spears Management Move—presenting something incredibly scandalous, while staunchly maintaining ignorance of any scandalous implications—Jive Records claimed that the title “[referred] to blocking out negativity and embracing life fully.”
That was not what Blackout meant, and everyone damn well knew it. The album was released at the peak of Spears’s trainwreck narrative—after her first rehab stay, after she shaved her head, after her divorce, after that fatal umbrella—and that of several other women. The MTV News post that listed the potential album titles also mentioned that Lohan was being sued for crashing into a parked van while driving drunk, and that Paris Hilton had been released from the medical ward at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, where she was serving time for her own DUI. Three weeks before Blackout was released, Hilton appeared on David Letterman, where he ritually humiliated her by refusing to ask her about anything other than her prison
time. (“I don’t really want to talk about it any more,” Hilton protested weakly. “This is where you and I are different,” Letterman said, grinning from ear to ear, “because this is all I want to talk about.”) In a year when the country cared about nothing more than punishing party girls, Spears was releasing an album named after binge drinking.
Which is to say, she was talking about it. She’d been talking about it for quite some time—in 2004, she and her label had evidently scrapped an album entitled Original Doll; one of the only surviving tracks was “Mona Lisa,” which contained the lyrics “Now see everyone’s watching / As she starts to fall / They want her to break down / And be a legend of a fall”—and she was by now committed to going on the offensive. One of the singles, “Piece of Me” (the songwriters claimed that they submitted it in violation of “an unwritten rule that no songs should be about Britney’s life”), was nothing more nor less than a recap of Britney Spears’s press narrative to date, beginning with “I’m Miss American Dream since I was seventeen” and continuing through “get in line with the paparazzi who’s flipping me off / hoping I’ll resort to some havoc, end up settling in court.” The video featured Spears seducing anonymous men in public bathrooms and dancing around on-screen tabloid headlines.
It’s a strange thing to realize, if your memory of that time (like mine) is of Spears, Lohan, and Hilton being subject to unremitting and unanimous hatred. But the Britney Spears Trainwreck Narrative always had a counterpoint, and it was coming from Britney Spears.
The story of the twentieth century is, in some ways, a story of women getting louder.
On some level, this is a technological thing. By the 1920s, we had movies, and recorded music, and radio—all the core elements of a celebrity-industrial complex. By the 1950s, we had the complex, and the industries devoted to covering it: Movie magazines, tabloids, gossip columns, television. As the century wound to a close, our powers of surveillance were astonishing: twenty-four-hour news channels, reality TV, fan sites, chat boards, and the beginnings of blogs, which would soon change everything about how trainwrecks were made. The sheer number of ways to publicize your mistakes—or, if you were unlucky, to have them publicized—escalated almost unthinkably far and fast over the course of eighty years. When Mary Wollstonecraft was being demolished, her critics couldn’t even publish an unflattering photo of her. If you wanted to call someone a slut, you had to resort to poetry. But by the time Britney showed up, the wonders of science had provided us with dozens or hundreds of ways to make her look like an asshole.
So, women became louder in part because, over the course of the twentieth century, everyone became louder. We gained—and are still gaining—vastly more access to the lives of total strangers, and that meant that women with public lives and careers had to develop new ways to defend themselves in the court of public opinion.
By the time Spears released Blackout, she was joining a long pop tradition of the “You Don’t Know Me” song: Back when Billie Holiday was working the redemption circuit, she was peppering her catalogue with songs about the evils of gossip (“Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” “ ’Taint Nobody’s Business If I Do”) so that her live shows could deliver elegant, subtly virtuosic variations on the message “kindly shut the fuck up about my drug use.” In 1992, Whitney Houston answered the scandalized questions about her marriage to Bobby Brown—why America’s squeaky-clean pop sweetheart was getting tangled up with a known drug user—by releasing a duet with him. It was entitled “Something in Common,” and opened with Brown announcing that the song “is dedicated to those who don’t believe in real love, especially our love.” The title phrase was repeated so many times that it stopped sounding like a hook, and started sounding like an attempt at mass brainwashing: We have something in common. We have something in common. We have something in common. Yes we do. Taylor Swift did the same thing with “Blank Space,” in 2014; it was possibly the best-received single of her career, and effectively halted the “Swift is a crazy ex-girlfriend” narrative in its tracks.
But maybe it’s a mistake to start with self-defense. The statements cited above are largely denials and disavowals, statements of I am not rather than I am, and this is how it is. And yet, in order for those women to publicly respond to the narratives about their lives, they had to have public lives in the first place—possible, in part, because the world had changed around them. Brace yourself, Reader. For I am about to un-ironically utter the phrase “consciousness-raising.”
It’s a weird little term, isn’t it? It makes you feel square and older than you thought you were, like going to the mall to pick out a sensible pantsuit. It has the unmistakable fug of the ’70s all over it: Just saying the phrase aloud seems to summon an air of un-ironic goddess-invoking, and handwritten cookbooks with a lot of material about lentils, and spelling it womyn, with the “y.” I always hear the tender, acoustic strains of womyn’s folk music in my head when I say it; I also, for some reason, envision handmade quilts. Which is all to say that “consciousness-raising,” as a concept or feminist tactic, has largely been relegated to that quilt-infested realm of the feminine and quaint: It seems to derive from, and chiefly appertain to, a world where young radicals were not yet worldly or jaded enough to be automatically creeped out by communes.
And yet, it is not so. “Consciousness-raising” was not only a powerful radical strategy, it’s perhaps the most relevant and enduring legacy of second-wave feminism. Beginning in the late 1960s, in radical feminist collectives such as the New York Radical Women and Redstockings, women began to sit down with each other, and take turns honestly answering each other’s questions. Here, from a 1971 guide to starting your own group, were some of the questions:
• Why did you marry the man you did? (or date the man you do?)
• What was your first sex experience?
• Do you pretend to have an orgasm?
• Have you had an abortion?
• What do you feel about lesbianism? What do you know about it?
I think that last question may be my favorite, simply because it sounds so very “have you heard of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” And, indeed, one of the many benefits of second-wave feminism was that it allowed and encouraged women to undertake independent study upon that matter. But then, perhaps most crucially, there was this one:
• What is a “nice girl”? Were you a “nice girl”?
This was the question that the feminist movement generally, and the consciousness-raising groups specifically, were out to answer. Not simply how to make the world better for women, but who women actually were: What they thought, what they felt, what they went through, and how very far it deviated from the established patriarchal script.
For some women, the project was purely pragmatic. In her essay on consciousness-raising, for example, Kathie Sarachild mentions the struggle over how to establish women’s intelligence. One colleague wanted to find the proof in studies, summon up the necessary facts and figures. But for Sarachild, that was a lost cause: “For every scientific study we quote, the opposition can find their scientific studies to quote … We know from our own experience that women play dumb for men because, if we’re too smart, men won’t like us. I know, because I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. Therefore, we can simply deduce that women are smarter than men are aware of[.]”
We know how to prioritize what social-justice types call “lived experience” now, and so it’s easy to forget how radical these statements really were. There were precedents—critics were quick to point out that consciousness-raising was suspiciously similar to the Maoist practice of “speaking bitterness”—but, in a world where women were mostly encouraged to focus on relationships with men, and to say mostly what those men wanted to hear, the mere fact of women talking to one another uninhibitedly, and regarding themselves and each other as credible sources on important subjects, was immensely strange. Feminist approaches like Sarachild’s put forth a new methodology—we know from our own experience; I
know, because I’ve done it—which rejected science, medicine, philosophy, and most of literature in order to argue that the only real “authorities” on womanhood were women. And not “special,” accomplished, or even particularly educated women: In this paradigm, women gained “expert” status simply by being female.
That was it. That was all it took to have more expertise than, say, Sigmund Freud. If you were a woman, and your experience suggested that Freud was wrong about vaginal orgasms—he thought you’d start having them once you accepted your role as a woman—and if you could talk to enough women whose orgasms suggested likewise, well, then, Freud was fucking wrong. And that was that. One of the leading theories of human sexuality, demolished in a few hours, simply by virtue of the fact that you’d talked about your sex life.
Advocates of consciousness-raising were quick to point out that their methodology was not unscientific. (“Our meetings were called coffee klatches, hen parties or bitch sessions,” Sarachild writes. “We responded by saying, ‘Yes, bitch, sisters, bitch.’ ”) The preferred procedure, for most groups, was to give each woman present the chance to answer a question, before moving on to the next question or discussion, and to remain (if at all possible) non-judgmental. This wasn’t for sisterly, kumbaya-singing reasons—women in these radical groups wound up hating each other as often as anyone else—but for the purpose of producing accurate data. You didn’t want to know how any particular woman felt, but how many women felt the same way, and you didn’t want to shut anyone down, because it would interfere with the flow of information.
And yet, the very nature of that intimacy could not help but open doors for particular and individual women. The best way forward for women, according to consciousness-raising, was to speak: bluntly, explicitly, very personally, and in the presence of someone who could hear you. You had to drop all the hiding, all the insecurity, and just claim your own narrative in your own words. It not only changed the agenda of the movement; it changed the participants’ ideas of themselves.
