Well-behaved women seldom make history
Suddenly, everybody is shocked, shocked to learn how often women are subjected to rude and ludicrous interruptions when they try to speak.
Kanye West steals the mic from Taylor Swift in mid-acceptance speech at the MTV awards in 2009, and everybody acts appalled. Northwestern University professors count the interruptions at U.S. Supreme Court hearings and find that female justices are interrupted way more frequently than their male counterparts. Mitch McConnell rips Elizabeth Warren for attempting to quote Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor and a whole line of T-shirts emblazoned with “Nevertheless she persisted” is born.
I don’t understand why anybody is surprised.
People, and don’t interrupt me now, this is not news. This is life.
Sure, there have always been exceptions to the very human urge to interrupt. Priests are allowed to speak, along with bosses, professors, the short guy with the megaphone who tells you where to line up for the free pizza rolls inside of Walmart.
But these are figures we hold in high esteem.
Women, on the other hand, have been dealing with interruptions since forever.
Long before Archie Bunker hectored his wife with “Stifle yourself, Edith,” there were parents, teachers and fellow students who talked over us without so much as a nanosecond’s hesitation.
Like the time in fourth grade when Nora, after raising her hand and waiting politely, was trying to convey something of great significance to the teacher and was rudely interrupted after just three words: “May I please … .”
“Just a minute,” said the teacher, who regrettably found his classroom splattered with some ever-so fragrant stomach contents before he deigned to let Nora finish her sentence.
As Mitch McConnell would say, nevertheless she persisted.
In my family, nobody listened. My four brothers interrupted each other incessantly. It was like verbal carpet-bombing. Everybody talked. Listening was for suckers.
I learned to write so I could finally finish a sentence.
Now, for the record, I agree that not all interruptions are bad.
A typical newsroom is a circus of interruptions with reporters and editors sharing stories and lobbing punch lines as the pressure builds and deadlines loom. Some of the best interviewers on TV and radio are impresarios of interruptions, using them skillfully to keep the conversation on point and to extract information from often-evasive interview subjects. Litigators would arrive unarmed in the courtroom without the freedom to interrupt a witness.
But anybody who has been smacked down publicly by a bully knows when an interruption is meant to flaunt power. (See: Mitch McConnell, above.)
The stunning episode in a recent hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee is a trickier case in point.
U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California, a former prosecutor, was peppering Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the nation’s top lawyer, with questions, interrupting him just like her colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, had done earlier, when she was unceremoniously shushed by the committee chair.
Just who was violating Senate decorum? Was it the young darkskinned woman who dared to press the old Southern white guy for answers in an investigative forum? Or the chair, another Southern white guy, who bristled at her assertive questioning of a friend and former colleague, and admonished her to ease up and “let him answer”?
It’s one more case where your place in the hierarchy of power likely determines your perception of who’s right and who’s wrong. Do you think Sessions should be treated deferentially by this woman and spared the hot seat, or that Harris’ interruptions were an appropriate tactic and interrupting her was just another sexist racist smackdown?
I know where I stand. But no matter what others think, I’m pretty sure Kamala Harris comes out of this controversy with her political standing enhanced.
It’s risky to publicly stifle a woman who has something important to say. That’s the lesson of the U.S. Senate … and the fourth grade. Diane Carman is a communications consultant and a regular columnist for The Denver Post.