Accountability cannot stop with survivors’ stories. Men must confront the culture that allows violence to persist.
A New York Times investigation released this week broke news of shocking sexual abuse allegations against labor leader César Chávez—from two women who were young teenagers at the time, and from Dolores Huerta, our long-time Ms. advisor, Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) board member, friend, and feminist and labor icon who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chávez.
“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” she said in a statement. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor—of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
The fact that Dolores felt she had to keep this secret speaks to the layers of harm that women who suffer sexual assault are often made to bear. Her story also speaks to the sexist culture that women in movement work—including movements for racial and economic justice—must put up with, more often than not, as they fight for equality. In her interview with the Times, Huerta explains how women ran so much of the farmworker movement, from the credit union to the clinic to the filed offices, but remained shut out of higher-level decision-making.
“César believed in promoting women as leadership, not at the policy level, but at the work level,” she said. “Women are not seen as human beings. We’re just seen as sex objects. I think it’s an illness.”
In fighting the culture that makes these actions not only possible, but permissible—and that encourages women like Huerta to remain silent for over 60 years—we must consider the role of men.
… Every man has a role to play in dismantling systemic violence against women … Until this work is done, countless women like Gisèle Pelicot and Dolores Huerta will continue to be assaulted and silenced.
Men, argues Ms. contributor Jackson Katz, are essential to shifting the narrative. In describing the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a woman who had been secretly drugged by her husband and set up to be raped by dozens of men over a 10-year period, Katz mentions the evocative nickname the case acquired in French media reports: Monsieur Tout-le-monde. Mr. Everyman.
If the 50 men who assaulted Pelicot were just “ordinary men” (“many were married and had kids. They were blue- and white-collar workers: a restaurant manager, nurse, computer technician, prison guard, firefighter, journalist, soldier,” Katz writes), then consequently, every man has a role to play in dismantling systemic violence against women.
This goes for men in movements like Huerta’s, but also for men everywhere. For fathers and brothers in families like Pelicot’s, for teachers in schools, for men in the trades and in boardrooms and in the military. Until this work is done, countless women like Gisèle Pelicot and Dolores Huerta will continue to be assaulted and silenced.
I’m left thinking about the words of one of the women in the Times story. When Esmeralda Lopez was 19, she was approached by Chavez, but rebuffed him, only to be fired from her job at a union health clinic within the year.
“It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” she told the reporters. “The movement—that’s the hero.”
To the women everywhere who make our movements run, we see you, and we hear you. Your work is heroic. And it should not require your silent suffering.
