#MeToo, or to re-purpose a famous Latin phrase, #EtInArcadiaEgo. I am a female classicist, and male classicists sexually harass me. In this article, I will talk about the culture of sexism, abuse, and fear of reprisal that is pervasive in our discipline, and in the spirit of the #MeToo movement, I will share some examples of what this sexual harassment looks like.
You will notice that I have chosen to write under a nom de plume, Hortensia. I chose this name to honor a classical progenitor of the women’s march: the daughter of the famous advocate Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, who descended upon the Roman Forum in 42 BCE with Rome’s 1400 other wealthiest women to protest a tax that had been levied on them by the second triumvirate.
The second century CE historian Appian represents Hortensia as making a passionate case that the women should not be forced to pay the state’s expenses since they had no part in the state’s honors, commands, and politics. “While Hortensia thus spoke,” Appian continues, “the triumvirs were angry that the women should dare to hold a public meeting when the men were silent” (4.33–34). But the triumvirs’ attempt to silence the women failed: a massive public outcry arose at the mistreatment of the women, and they were forced to reduce the number taxed from 1400 to 400.
Hortensia’s disruption of a male space and her eloquent speech in the face of entrenched male silence recalls not just the Women’s March of this past January, but also the recent #MeToo movement. There is no doubt that these are positive, culture-shifting movements in which women have broken their silence to address the systemic injustices to which they have been subjected. But they also share the same weakness.
Just as Hortensia was only speaking on behalf of Rome’s wealthiest women, so too the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement have been called out for the privilege that lies behind them: the one was a sea of white faces, the other a hashtag credited to the white actress Alyssa Milano when it is in fact the name of a movement that was started by a black woman, Tarana Burke, 10 years ago.
I chose this pseudonym to acknowledge both the tensions inherent in our study of the classical past and those of my own past as a white, wealthy, cis, able-bodied woman with job security. Like the Women’s March, our field is a sea of white, wealthy faces, and it is because of the privilege inherent in my position that I feel comfortable saying #MeToo at all. But I also recognize that unless I use this privilege to lift up everyone else that experiences harassment, within and outside our field, the #MeToo movement has no legitimacy — it is just another example of white women advocating solely for our own interests.
In that spirit of inclusion, let me tell you the story of an average female classicist, one who is white, wealthy, cis, and able-bodied. Judging from the experiences other female classicists have shared with her, her story is fairly unexceptional. She has never been raped, groped, or kissed against her will by a male classicist, for example, and she has largely managed to succeed in our field by most of the agreed-upon markers of success. She feels fortunate not to be a field archaeologist, where abuse of power seems to run far more rampant. It is my story, and I am willing to tell it because I want to break the silence around the way that women are treated in our discipline in the hopes that the next generation of female classicists don’t have to fight all the same battles that my generation (and the even braver generations of female classicists before mine) has had to fight.
My experiences with gender-based discrimination and harassment began the first time I told a professor that I wanted to make classics my career: when I proudly relayed my plans to earn a Ph.D. to my undergraduate adviser, his response was to advise me to get a master’s degree and teach high school Latin instead. At the same meeting, he advised my then-boyfriend, who was also a classics major, that he was the one more suited to Ph.D. study.
Two years later, when I was a senior applying to Ph.D. programs, my adviser told me he doubted my chances: an eminent professor at a top-ranked institution had recently told him that they never accepted women who went to the sort of undergraduate institution I had attended, because they were seen as “coddled”. A few months later, when I had accepted an offer for graduate study at a top-ranked institution, my adviser informed me that it was the very institution this professor hailed from.
Things continued largely in this vein in graduate school. One time the very professor who had said women like me were not to be accepted for Ph.D. work “jokingly” accused me of flirting with him in a graduate seminar. That same year, another professor told a fellow graduate student in a one-on-one meeting that she had to learn to straddle the line between “dumb” and “bitch” in the classroom; he encouraged her to wear heels. It was with this graduate student that I learned the lesson that has sustained me in this profession to this day: the best way to survive and thrive as a woman in our discipline is to establish a close-knit group of like-minded female classicists with whom you can safely share your stories and commiserate in turn.
My experiences with sex-based discrimination became worse when I moved from the safety of graduate school to the tenuousness of being a contingent faculty member. One of my colleagues made inappropriate sexual comments to me when we were alone after hours in the department. A student obtained my phone number and texted me at all hours inviting me to frat parties. Male TAs were misidentified multiple times as the instructors of my classes, even though I was standing right beside them: I was Miss or Mrs. in student emails, while they were given the title Professor or Doctor (an unscientific survey of female faculty suggests there is no more common affliction than this). To cap it all off, one of these TAs told me that he masturbated to thoughts of how sexy I looked when I lectured: he seemed to think this was a compliment.
My job situation eventually improved, and — not coincidentally, I think — so did the way that I was treated by male classicists. At a conference last summer, I saw a very well-known male classicist (one whose behavior towards young women is an open secret in our field) publicly subjecting a female graduate student I knew to the most merciless sexual harassment: innuendo, touching, leering. This was happening in full view of dozens of people, several of whom disapproved, but none of whom intervened. Seeking to rescue my acquaintance, I approached the pair, but my tactic backfired: I was immediately subjected to the same behavior. Finally — “where are you studying?” he asked me. When I told him I had a full-time, permanent job, he could not leave me alone fast enough.
This list of episodes is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to offer a general representation of the various situations in which female classicists are harassed in our discipline: after hours in the department, in a classroom, at a conference; by their advisers, their colleagues, their students. We have listened to one another’s stories for years, and we have consoled our female students when they are harassed in turn. None of us are surprised by the avalanche of #metoos that have come pouring out of women for the past two months. What is surprising is that these stories are now beginning to be believed.
I realize, however, that there is a danger that everything I have shared here will not be believed because I am not brave enough to share it under my own name. There are certainly downsides to anonymity, and the “shitty media men” spreadsheet that circulated when the Harvey Weinstein case first broke offers perhaps the most potent one: it is exponentially harder to verify anything when identities are obscured. That said, many of the names on that list have subsequently been outed as sexual predators, suggesting that for these women, the ability to anonymously report gave them the courage they needed to disclose the harassment and abuse they had lived with for years.
As the now-daily outpouring of disclosures makes clear, the fields that offer a fertile ground for this sort of sexual harassment and abuse are all linked by a few common denominators. They are fields that have long been dominated by men (Hollywood, media, comedy, fashion), they are fiercely competitive, and their routes to advancement often go through a few powerful individuals, meaning that anyone who says no to an abuser is right to fear blacklisting and other reprisals. Likewise, in most of these fields, these powerful individuals wear a façade of liberalism, and sometimes even feminism, which they can wield as a badge to shut down any complaints against them.
Does this sound familiar? It should, because all of these denominators also describe the world of academia, and especially male-dominated disciplines like classics. As K.A. Amienne puts it,
Anytime you have a highly competitive system in which a single person has the power to make or break someone else’s career — whether it’s the crowded, greasy pole of Hollywood or a flooded Ph.D. pipeline — you will have abuse. Not only rape and overt sexual aggression, but also the many complicated and twisted forms of abuse that can sink a woman’s chances of succeeding in an already biased business.
…
In the humanities, our approach to bullying, manipulation, coercion, and control is made worse by the fact that we spend our days critiquing gender norms, power structures, and injustice — convinced that we will speak truth to that power if we ever run across it in real life. We are all good liberals, we think. Abuse couldn’t happen here.
But as every female classicist could no doubt attest, abuse does happen here, and the culture of silence that supports it runs very deep in our tiny, insular discipline.
In fact, this article was originally supposed to be broader, telling the stories of a number of female classicists from whom I have heard disclosures of sexual abuse and harassment over the years. None of them would let me put these stories on the record, even if I kept them anonymous: even though I myself had decided to publish anonymously, they were afraid that other classicists would uncover my identity, determine who my friends are in the discipline, and then figure out who their abusers were.
Sexual abuse is almost always about power, and the power in our field is concentrated among a small number of readily identifiable people, most of them men. I am sure, for example, that as anonymous as I’ve sought to make this article, some of the abuses I have detailed will be identifiable. This is made easier by the fact that frequently — as with the eminent classicist hitting on the grad student — the nature of the abuse is an open secret, the subject of whisper campaigns and gossip among female (and male) classicists who want to warn each other, but don’t feel comfortable enough to do anything concrete.
Whisper campaigns are necessary in a culture as rife with reprisals as classics. Take, for example, two recently publicized cases of sexual harassment of female classicists. The first is that of Lauren Caldwell at Wesleyan, whose alleged harassment at the hands of a dean led to a campus-wide administrative effort to silence her and force her to leave her job — at the same time as her alleged abuser was given an endowed chair.
The second is that of Jane Doe, a graduate student at Columbia University, whose lawsuit against William Harris (whose abuse could not have been more of an open secret among classicists) led to his removal from teaching duties. Initially, however, the university took steps to ignore and downplay Jane Doe’s repeated complaints, and even after Harris’ removal from the classroom, he remains a faculty member in full standing and is presumably on paid leave; the New York Times article on the case opens by referring to him as “a distinguished historian.” In our field, men are still distinguished even when accused of abuse, while women are forced to remain anonymous if we want to protect our jobs.
Harris is an extreme case, though I have heard my share of stories like his about other male classicists: I know several female classicists who have had male classicists force themselves sexually on them, kissing them, fondling them, or worse. And I don’t know a single female classicist who has not been subjected to milder but still unwanted sexual advances from male classicists: hugs, inappropriate touches, suggestive comments.
What can sometimes be even more wearying, however — because it is so constant — is the everyday drudge of being a female classicist, experiencing those “complicated and twisted forms of abuse that can sink a woman’s chances of succeeding in an already biased business.” Based on my own experiences and stories I have heard from others, female classicists get up and go into our departments every day to be belittled; held to a higher standard than men for tenure and promotion or denied a job altogether; sexualized; objectified; told that our clothes are too stylish or too staid, that we wear too much or too little makeup, that we’re too pretty or not pretty enough; told that we should be married by now or (more often) shouldn’t; told we should have children by now or (more often) shouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t have any more than we do; disbelieved when we complain of gender-related abuse; told that the way we are treated is normal (that’s just “how it is”); and disrespected by our colleagues, our graduate students, and even our undergraduates.
What resources do the women who are treated in this way have to combat abuse? Legally, they could report it to their university’s EEO offices or Title IX coordinators or ombudsperson. This is, in fact, what the SCS recommends, in what was until very recently the only information that could be found on their website about sexual harassment and abuse, their “statement on professional ethics.” It will inform you that “complaints about sexual harassment should be filed with the appropriate administrative office of the institution where the offense has occurred.” But in a field so rife with contingent employment, underemployment, and unemployment, and in a system in which abusers are routinely of a higher status than those they abuse, to report to the institution where the abuse occurred means to risk one’s job security.
Moreover, this SCS statement does not take into account the sexual harassment that routinely occurs at its annual meetings, and the way that women there — and at other conferences — are more generally talked over, disrespected, and belittled (one friend, for example, shared the tale of an eminent classicist who spoke after her on a panel, and apologized to the audience that they had had to “sit through that” while waiting for his brilliance). On November 6 (when I was already in the process of writing this article), the organization remedied this oversight, releasing the following statement drafted by the Women’s Classical Caucus on harassment at the annual meeting:
The SCS and its members seek to create an atmosphere at their annual conference in which participants may learn, network, and converse with colleagues in an environment of mutual respect. Everyone who attends the annual meeting is entitled to an experience that is free from harassment, bullying, and intimidation directed towards any attendee. Harassment includes, but is not limited to, sexual harassment, such as unwelcome sexual advances, or other verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature. Harassment also pertains to activities/behaviors such as stalking, queer/trans bullying, or hostility or abuse based on age, disability, religion, race or ethnicity. Such conduct is harmful, disrespectful and unprofessional. No attendee should under any circumstance engage in harassment, bullying, or intimidation of other attendees either in person or online. By attending the meeting, all participants accept the obligation to uphold the rights of attendees and treat everyone with respect. The SCS does not seek to limit the areas of inquiry of its members or to curtail robust scholarly debate. Its aim is to promote critical and open inquiry that is free of personal harassment, prejudice and aggression.
The new policy goes on to encourage those who have been harassed at the annual meeting to disclose the incident in writing to the Vice President for Professional Matters. The report will remain confidential and will be shared only with the Professional Ethics Committee. The SCS and WCC are to be commended for making a start on this issue, yet this statement and its related policy leave much to be desired: most notably because the policy does not address how victims will be protected against retaliation and makes no mention of consequences for abusers. In a discipline where women don’t even feel comfortable going on the record anonymously in an anonymously written article, it is difficult to see how this new policy will enact any meaningful change if there is no protection for those who report and no consequences for those they report on.
Yet I am actually optimistic that our culture — and our discipline — has come to a point where meaningful change is possible. Recently, I was having drinks with a female academic (not in classics) and a male classicist. As I was explaining some of the sexist behavior I had witnessed in our field, my female friend interrupted me to say that compared to her field, female classicists didn’t have it so bad.
Maybe it was because of the drinks or maybe it was just my sheer exhaustion at the systemic abuse women in our field endure, but I lost my cool: first I shouted some obscenities, then I burst into tears. “Just like a woman,” some might say, and it’s true that my response was very feminine: it was based on the anger, sadness, frustration, and despair that have been pent up in me for years because of how women in our discipline are treated. I asked my female friend then, and I ask again now: why is it necessary for women to rank their pain?
It is clear that we are subjected to disadvantages in academia at every level, that we are harassed and abused, that we are forced to keep quiet about it. Fortunately for me, after my outburst both of my friends — male and female alike — listened to me, they heard my pain, and then, the most remarkable thing of all happened: they believed me. This is why I’m optimistic.
Just imagine what we could achieve if every survivor in our field stood up and said “me too,” and if everyone else in our field believed them. I invite you to stand with me, my fellow women of Rome (and Greece). Make the triumvirs sweat.
This article is the first in a new series, entitled Philomela’s Tapestry, designed to address issues of harassment in the fields that study Greco-Roman antiquity. If you have a story or article idea for this series, contact us at pitches@eidolon.pub (or, for anonymous stories, confidential@eidolon.pub).
