Michelle Obama’s Speech: As Personal As Political Gets; BillMoyers.com, 10/14/16

Lynn Sherr, BillMoyers.com; Michelle Obama’s Speech: As Personal As Political Gets:

"“It reminds us of stories we’ve heard from our mothers and grandmothers about how back in their day the boss could say and do whatever he pleased to the women in the office. And even though they worked so hard, jumped over every hurdle to prove themselves, it was never enough. We thought all of that was ancient history, didn’t we?”

I sure did. It was 1979 when I was at ABC News that I did my first story on sexual harassment — perhaps the first network news piece on the ugly variation on sex discrimination. The concept was so novel, I had to spell it out on screen, and define it. To illustrate it, I used a scene from a movie – it was always played for laughs – of the lustful boss chasing his hapless secretary around the desk. Such innocent times: I talked about dealing with “a comment, a pinch or an unwanted proposition.” One of the victims took it further. Her boss, she said, “told me, ‘You’re gonna screw me or be canned.’” There were, I pointed out helpfully, now solutions: the law, the courts. But as Obama wisely noted in her speech, “here we are in 2016 and we’re hearing these exact same things every day of the campaign trail.” Simply because “all of us are doing what women have always done. .. Just trying to get through it, trying to pretend like this doesn’t really bother us.”

Back in the 1960s, when relatively few of us were traveling for business on a regular basis, a few female friends and I joked about inventing an inflatable belly, so that when we were (invariably) seated on airplanes next to annoying male seat mates, we could pull the cord and look pregnant. Memo to Donald Trump, who wondered why the woman who says he groped her on the plane didn’t contact airline personnel: back then, stewardesses paid little attention to other women. Sisterhood wasn’t powerful enough. Yet."