My Generation Thought Women Were Empowered. Did We Deceive Ourselves?

By Lucinda Franks 

When I started out in journalism in the 1970s, attitudes toward sexual harassment among the token women sprinkled about in newsrooms were nearly antithetical to those we’ve heard from the women who have come forth in recent weeks with a flood of anguished revelations.

My first job was at the London bureau of a prominent international wire service. When I walked in the newsroom, the all-male staff gaped at me as if I were an oasis in a desert. They were soon disappointed. I responded with such aloofness, they called me the Ice Princess. I felt lonely, in need of a friend. I suppose this is why I responded when one reporter began to engage me in conversation. My hopes rose — until I felt the hand slowly sneaking up my thigh. I dispatched him with an elbow in the torso. And the guy who grabbed my butt the next day got a swift back kick into the kneecap and a couple of four-letter words.

My generation of women came of age amid the exhilaration of second-wave feminism: We saw ourselves as strong, fierce self-defenders. Inappropriate sexual advances, we told ourselves, were simply an opportunity to prove our superiority over the weaker sex. Few of us believed we sustained any serious damage, and most of us thought that with enough grit, we could defy the odds and find our way.

One night after work, a group of reporters invited me to the local Irish pub. In the space of an hour, we downed several big glasses of Guinness, with Paddy Whiskey chasers. I was terrified, but I knew how crucial this test was. I would absolutely deny them the pleasure of seeing me fall off my stool. I kept up with them drink for drink and didn’t pass out until I put the key to my apartment inside the door. But I collapsed with a warm feeling, giddy at the thought of their respect. It’s not that I wanted to be one of the guys — I just wanted to be a good journalist, with perhaps a place in the bigger club that ran the world.

I soon found myself in Northern Ireland, in the middle of a ferocious attack on Catholics by club-wielding Protestants. I sustained a superficial scalp wound and, excitedly bloody, I found a pay phone. I began dictating a first-person story when the London bureau chief came on the line. He was an irascible eccentric known for flinging Remington typewriters at offending reporters, and he wasn’t happy to hear from me. “Damn you, get your tail back here. Women aren’t allowed in war zones!” he shouted. At the time, he was too apoplectic to see that a good story would be over by the time he found a man to replace me, but he gradually, grudgingly let me stay.

Once I returned, I saw him darkly flipping through my copy. I ducked. “Franks,” he finally pronounced with congratulatory gravity, “I don’t think of you as a woman anymore. You write like a man.”

I still can’t help thinking of this as the ultimate compliment. I was already brainwashed.

When the sluice opened a few months ago and men across all industries began to take sudden and precipitous falls, at first, I was slightly skeptical. I was puzzled by the stories some women told about freezing up, unable to repel a boss or sometimes even a co-worker. A few maintained that when they did resist, they felt guilty and fearful, and wrote emails the next day apologizing and asking for another chance. I felt bad for them, and yet my honest reaction was confusion: What feminist, I wondered, would be so desperate as to trade her self-respect for a job?

As the stories about what these women experienced became more perverted and even downright weird, I wondered whether male hubris had finally gone berserk. Had the sexualization of American popular culture in the 1990s and 2000s taken the restraints off the male id, freeing men to pursue their most absurd fantasies — holding professional interviews at their homes, parading around naked under open bathrobes in front of job applicants? Had feminism, with its promotion of sexual freedom, combined with these cultural changes, paradoxically poured gas on the fires of these workplace assaults? Or had this stomach-turning type of aggression simply evaded the rumor mill but been happening all along?

As I thought about this, more of my own memories came back. Had our pioneering generation deceived ourselves?

Of course, back then we were fully aware of the quid pro quo of the casting couch, where men in power could use that power to make or break a young woman’s career. We warned our sisters, but we spoke in whispers, never aloud. Maybe we were more afraid than we admitted.

Even if most of us may not have suffered serious sexual harassment, how many of us sustained more hidden damage inflicted by insecure men — especially if we had the audacity to be successful?

Two years after I joined the news service, I won the Pulitzer Prize. I suffered for it mightily. That I was the first woman to win for national reporting — I had been brought to New York to do a five-part series on the violent antiwar Weatherman group — made it only worse. I could see it in their bowed heads: We’ve been striving for years to win that coveted prize and a 24-year-old walks away with it! The entire bureau of men refused to speak to me that day and the days after.

I was haunted by the creeping conviction that I didn’t deserve the prize — I should give it back. For at least the next 10 years, I was too ashamed to tell people I’d won.

Subtler moments of discrimination in my younger days have been coming back over the past few weeks: the stories killed before I’d even finished them; the time I came back to work after visiting my ailing mother and a man my age, hired for much higher wages, had been awarded my promised transfer to Paris.

When you get older, gender discrimination gets easier, somewhat predictable and sometimes even funny. But it doesn’t stop — even if you’ve published four books and had a long journalism career. When my last book came out, I was interviewed by a certain talk show host, before he was stripped of his job because of gross sexual misconduct charges. I had hardly opened my mouth before he fell asleep. During the rest of the interview, he kept nodding off while the camera judiciously avoided him. When I left the studio, he had popped awake for his new guests. I saw him waving his hands enthusiastically while speaking with two high-powered male journalists.

I herald this latest female generation for their courage in revealing their humiliations for the chance to change society. We, the earliest female newswomen, were tough, ambitious, even cocky about our talent, but over the years, our self-confidence was often irreparably harmed. Our generation might have been smart, but there was much we just didn’t get. Grateful to win a place in the hierarchy of power, we didn’t understand the ways that gender degradation still shaped our work lives. A few years ago, I met a fellow who had won a Pulitzer for foreign reporting the year before. When he finally discovered what we had in common, he said in a scolding voice: “You’re the shyest Pulitzer winner I’ve ever met. Do you understand you won the highest award in journalism? When I got it, I shouted it to the skies.”

And the skies clearly listened.