Bearing Witness: Sexual Harassment and Beyond - Everywoman's Story - Hardcover

Interweaving compelling case histories with social commentary, political writer Morris (Storming the Statehouse, 1992, etc.) delivers a sobering study of sexual harassment in all its lewd and loathsome guises. Legions of women identified with Anita Hill when she testified against her former boss, Clarence Thomas, in 1991. And no wonder: according to Morris, one out of every 12 women will be raped or threatened with rape at some point in her lifetime. Morris, on tour to promote her previous book, set out to talk to victims of sexual harassment and record their stories. Although she admits that her survey is hardly scientific, the narratives she collects, from factory workers in Indiana to neurosurgeons in California, draw a disturbing portrait of a world where sexual harassment in the workplace--from cat-calling to fanny-patting to rape--is almost as common as chitchat around the water-cooler. The stories, in which the speakers are given ample space to tell their tales, are often moving: Maria, the Mexican housekeeper who was repeatedly raped by her wealthy chiropractor boss in his household in Petaluma, California, possesses the tragic dimensions of a John Steinbeck character; Dr. Frances Conley, the Stanford University neurosurgeon who threatened to resign when her colleague, Dr. Gerald Silverberg, a notorious sexual harasser of nurses and female doctors, was appointed chairman of the neurosurgery department, seems a kind of modern-day Joan of Arc. But when Morris grounds the problem of sexual harassment in a historical context, she stumbles: In jumping, in the space of one paragraph, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's charges that the Bible is inherently misogynist to Shakespeare's allegedly sexist portraits of women in The Taming of the Shrew, she becomes intellectually careless, choosing the shrillness of polemics over the subtlety of careful analysis. Still, despite its flaws, a groundbreaking book. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

After Clarence Thomas's 1991 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court were rocked by Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment, Morris ( Storming the Statehouse ) decided to collect "corroborating testimony: stories that might demonstrate how common--even tame--Hill's initial experiences with Clarence Thomas had been." She wanted to tear away what Edmund Burke called "the decent drapery of life," the blanket of silence that protects predatory men and, as she discovered during her interviews, that is maintained by other women--mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and co-workers. Most of the book is drawn from Morris's interviews, as women talk of verbal harassment and physical abuse and the variety of responses from putting up with it to whistleblowing. Only in the final third of the book does Morris begin a historical analysis, citing the shaping force of popular culture . While she provides interesting portraits of several women working on issues like rape treatment and sexual harassment, Morris could have addressed more fully the question of how to establish healthier patterns of male-female interaction. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.