Me, Too

   I experienced sexual harassment In 1976 when I was nineteen years old. I worked in the accounting department of Buffalo Electric Company in downtown Houston, Texas. My boss was the Chief Financial Officer and Vice-President of the company. He had a corner office with a plate glass window that looked out over the five women and one man in our office. The President had an identical corner office opposite him. When I was first hired my fellow colleagues warned me about Don, our boss. “Don’t ever get caught alone with him,” they said. I thanked them for the warning and forgot about it. A few months later, he tricked me as sexual harassers are apt to do. A customer called and needed us to go run down a part in the warehouse. I wasn’t quite familiar with the layout of the warehouse yet. He would gladly show me where the part was located. We walked out into the warehouse past aisle after aisle of metal shelves twelve feet high. I was awed by all of the thousands of parts. Before I knew it we had walked to a quiet corner of the warehouse. “It’s right down this aisle,” he said. We walked to the end of the aisle. He pointed to a high shelf in the corner. I began to read the part numbers on boxes, then realized his long arms were trapping me, one on the wall and one on the shelf. I turned around, panicked to realize I was trapped in the corner. He smiled lasciviously; he thought he had me and he moved in and tried to force a kiss on my lips. I didn’t have time to think. I slipped out from under him so fast he did not have time to grab me and I ran all the way back to the office.

Tell Everyone

   There were no sexual harassment laws back then but there was a way to be empowered. When I returned to the office I told everyone what had just happened. We all decided to go to lunch together the next day and discuss what to do. We made a plan. We decided none of the women in the office would ever go into the warehouse with Don alone, or the one young man who worked in our office and ran the com system would go instead to run down parts when needed. That is exactly what happened. From that day forward that young man quickly volunteered to run down all of the parts, even though it was not his job. My boss never bothered me after that because we never gave him an opportunity to do so.  I think he sensed something had changed. We were all a lot closer to each other after that day. We were comrades united against a common cause. Another young girl got hired fresh out of high school. Don tried his dirty tricks on her but one of us always intervened. The remainder of my time in that office Don was quite grumpy and did not attempt to socialize with us nearly as often as he used to. I think this closeness and camaraderie is what so many women are feeling now with the “Me, too” movement. Far too many women and men have endured sexual harassment perpetrated by those in power over them. I am encouraged by the veracity of the movement and the concrete change the women who started the Time’s Up organization seek.

Time’s Up

   Time’s Up has already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help people who are victims of sexual harassment, mostly women, but some men, too. This is a wonderful beginning. This money will be needed the most by the powerless working class women and men who courageously decide to file legal harassment charges against their abusers, who are almost always their superiors in the workplace. But as more women step forward and tell their story we must steel ourselves for the inevitable push back to come. Do not doubt this will happen and it will be powerful men who will lead the charge. Those in power will begin to grumble about accusers and how they can ruin careers with their accusations. They will claim that if a woman has a vendetta against her boss, all she has to do is play the sexual harassment card. It will suddenly sound as if the accusers are  the ones doing something wrong. It will all be designed to get victims of sexual harassment to go back into the shadows and keep quiet. Even with all of this support, it takes a tremendous amount of courage to come forward. The victim who comes forward often has to face unfair judgement from her peers. She will often be whispered about in hallways as that person who got the boss fired. Don’t listen to any of the nonsense and just remember to be honest with yourself about what you are experiencing and if you don’t want to report it, for whatever reason, that is your prerogative, but at least remember my experience and warn your other coworkers so you can keep each other safe.