MOLLY MONTGOMERY PHOTO
Russo: “Every day and every way Donald Trump is inspiring more and more women to run.”
At the end of a panel discussion about the #MeToo movement , audience member Kristen Sullivan stood up to thank the panelists for “little things” in her life that she believed were the result of other people coming forward with their stories.
Then she told her own story.
“I work where we have deliveries,” Sullivan. “And we have a truck driver come in and look at myself and my coworker, who’s a female, and his response, or his engagement, to us was, ‘Where is everyone?’
“‘Well, we’re right here.’
“‘No, why is no one here?’ And he’s clearly looking for men to unload the truck, as if you need special body parts to press a pedal and steer a wheel.
“But the response to that from coworkers and other people was, ‘What do you want us to do about it? Should we make a complaint?’ versus, I think a year and a half ago, it would have been responded to as, ‘Oh, the women are making noise.’”
Sullivan offered her story during an event held Tuesday night at Yale’s Loria Center on York Street for a post-election discussion about the evolution of the #MeToo movement since the initial revelations about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and assault of women in the industry. The Poynter Felowship in Journalism and the Women Faculty Forum sponsored the event, which was titled, “#MeToo Evolving: People, Politics & Power. Now.”
Gathered at a table before an audience of about a hundred were Rebecca Corbett, the New York Times editor who led the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning reportage on sexual harassment; Meredith Talusan, a journalist who advocates for coverage of trans individuals within #MeToo; Alex Wagner, co-host and executive producer of the weekly political documentary The Circus; and Patricia Russo, executive director of the Women’s Campaign School at Yale.
Russo said that Donald Trump, ironically, is propelling women into politics – even women who didn’t vote in the 2016 election.
“Every day and every way Donald Trump is inspiring more and more women to run,” she said.
The day after the Women’s March, she said, she received hundreds of telephone messages for the Women’s Campaign School, many of which said something along the lines of, “Hi, my name is Anna. I marched. I’m mad. I want to run. When’s your next session? Call me back.”
When Russo called back, she often found that the women on the other end of the line hadn’t voted in the election. “But I’m mad now,” they would say. “I marched, I’m mad, and I’m running for office.”
Later, she added, “We just have to keep it up. And that’s our whole focus. Our whole focus is, ‘Me too,’ is, ‘Oh my god, I can’t take the thought of another fat-ass white boy running!’”
Wagner had the last word.
“Maybe if there’s anything we learn from this moment,” she said, “it’s that those who are seen as powerless among us matter just as much as those with power, and that, if told correctly, those stories can change a society.”