Clara Jane Hendrickson | Taking women seriously

Praxis | Why transforming public discourse matters for young women

By Clara Jane Hendrickson 04/24/16 10:44pm

“This is good. These girls always think it will help to talk to the press, and every time they come off looking cheap.” This line from “Confirmation,” a docudrama about the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings has stuck with me for days. Uttered by a Republican senator trying to push Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court in the wake of law professor Anita Hill’s accusations that Thomas sexually harassed her, this line emphasizes that it didn’t matter if Hill’s story was true or not; it mattered whether she was a convincing and smart victim of sexual harassment.

Hill was taken seriously precisely because of her professionalism and her ability to speak eloquently about her victimhood, dealing a credible threat to the senators trying to push Thomas’ nomination forward.

This same week, I also read journalistic accounts of the greater levels of anxiety teenage girls experience compared to males, as well as the recent finding that, in the last 15 years, the suicide rate has climbed steeply among adolescent girls. I couldn’t help but think about the stages on which women are forced to perform both in the public eye and in their families. The way forward to improving young women’s mental wellbeing does not lay in changing family values alone; the public narrative must be transformed as well. The anxiety adolescent girls experience must be connected with the social experiences of women.

One piece I read discussed the trope of the parent concerned about their underachieving son while bragging about their daughter who receives straight A’s in school. But despite her success, chances are that this successful young woman is experiencing great anxiety. “On the surface, she is the golden girl. Inside, she is falling apart.” Too many news stories and displays of public grief express shock and awe that the girls who appear to have everything going for them are turning to self-harm and even committing suicide.

Of course, this trend is deeply tragic and horrific, but I do not think it is particularly surprising because the “she had everything” mantra is rather thin. Girls and women are constantly pressured to answer to forces outside themselves and their experiences. The golden daughter becomes the symbol of parental success and the example for other siblings to follow. Similarly, Anita Hill became a pawn in Thomas’ race politics with many accusing Anita Hill of being a “race traitor” by threatening Thomas’ nomination with her charges of sexual harassment.

The “she had everything” mantra disregards the firsthand experiences of girls and women as secondary. In Hill’s case, it mattered how convincing, professional and eloquent her story was. It mattered that she was disrupting the status quo, posing a viable threat to an old boys’ network where the ethos of “anything goes” reigns. For parents proud of the golden daughter, it seems to matter what her grades are and how many sports she plays. We are not paying attention to what is going on inside her.

The “she had everything” mantra is less about the experiences of women than it is about the public perception of a woman’s experience. “She had everything” is the explanation for why young women shouldn’t be falling apart inside. Anita Hill had everything: professionalism and eloquence, and was therefore credible. “She had everything” is a tool used both to elevate and encompass women’s accomplishments while at the same time dismiss their autonomy. It is the tool used to delegitimize the internal experience of anxious female adolescents — “why are you unhappy if you are performing at such a high level?”

We assume that young women inevitably accept that the things we like about them are the things they like about themselves, and we are profoundly confused when this is not the case. But it is not so confusing in a world where we continue to only take some of the women who have lived through sexual harassment and assault seriously, where we subject women’s agency to an ability to be eloquent and well -mannered first and foremost. In this way, women’s firsthand experiences with anxiety or sexual harassment and violence trail far behind perception both in the public and in the home ... which remains primary.

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