One of my most vivid childhood memories is coming home from school to find my mother crying at our kitchen table. It didn’t happen every day, but often enough for me to feel nervous on the bus ride home. I used to think it was cruel of my mother not to tell me why she cried. But then I found out, and I understood why she kept it to herself.
It was disorienting to discover my father was not the man I thought he was. When I was little, being “Daddy’s girl” was as much a part of my identity as “book worm” and “Red Sox fan.” Many years later, I have zero interest in being Daddy’s anything. Not just because of what I learned about my father, but also because of what I learned about my world.
It took many years for me to process that my father kept a girlfriend on the side. I worked through my shock and horror by writing a book. Letters from Strangers is a work of fiction, but it’s infused with hard truths about what it was like to grow up at a time when women were groomed to be playthings, and men felt entitled to have as many toys as their money could buy.
By many standards, I’ve had a charmed existence. I grew up in a nice house, went to Harvard, then landed a coveted, entry-level job in Hollywood as an assistant director trainee on movie sets. It’s tempting to cite the successes of some of my contemporaries (Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, Betty Thomas) as proof that discrimination on the basis of sex was not a thing. But the success of some does not disprove the oppression of others – many of whom did not realize they were oppressed. I, for one, never considered the belittling comments and manhandling of my feminine assets to be abuse. Because I’d been conditioned to think being mistreated was normal.
If life imitates art, director David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network is a telling case study. In the opening scene, poor, unpedigreed Mark Zuckerberg frets to his girlfriend that he won’t get an invitation to join Harvard’s elite old boys’ network (known as Final Clubs). Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay, could have had Zuckerberg’s girlfriend express indignation; how dare he complain he’ll be rebuffed because he’s not a nepo baby? At least, as a man, he has a shot! Did it not occur to her (or rather, to Sorkin) that there was a bigger injustice at play here? Is that why it never occurred to me?
For four years I paid the same tuition as the men of Harvard, but I was never an equal. If I wanted to enter a hallowed Final Club, I needed a male escort. And also, I needed to get in line. Because Final Club members brought in women from neighboring colleges (Wellesley, Simmons, Mount Holyoke) by the busload. Boys will be boys, we scoffed with an eyeroll while the university turned the other cheek. It wasn’t until my twenty-fifth reunion (in 2016) that the top brass at Harvard finally acknowledged that denying Harvard women equal access to these clubs was discriminatory and began the process of unraveling it – long after the damage to my generation had been done.
I went from Harvard to the only meritocracy in Hollywood: the DGA Assistant Director’s training program, where participants are chosen based on their performance on a series of gender-blind written tests. My first job was with an all-male crew who referred to me as “peasant girl.” As a member of the Director’s Guild of America, I had rank over the three, non-union male production assistants, but they still bossed me around. And I let them. Why? Because Harvard had conditioned me to believe I was inferior, so that’s how I behaved.
I was not sexually assaulted on that set, but I was on several others – by actors, producers, the men in power who knew I would let them. It didn’t occur to me to resist their advances. The mechanisms our bosses used to silence us were so firmly cemented in the culture we didn’t even understand we were being violated. Did those men know their behavior was predatory? Or were they just behaving according to societal norms? Were we blind to the pervasive sexism because writers like Aaron Sorkin neglected to call it out? Did that movie perpetuate the systematic gaslighting of women, or merely capture it? And what’s the difference?
One might look at my mother’s life and ask, what was the problem? She had a nice house, a weekly housekeeper, an imported car (a Jaguar!). But her whole life was on her husband’s terms. He came home when he wanted to, which was sometimes not at all. When she complained, he reminded her that he who makes the money makes the rules. I think she cried not just for herself, but for every woman who had unwittingly let their fathers, husbands, and longstanding patriarchal norms dictate their worth.
My mother’s tears, once a source of childhood confusion, now resonate with painful clarity. They weren’t just about being forced to swallow a devastating secret so I could continue to believe I was the apple of my father’s eye; they were also about her discovery that “kept” women had no right to define the conditions of their captivity. Like so many, she hadn’t realized it was a trap until she was too old and encumbered to escape it. Why didn’t she see it earlier? Same reason I didn’t. The systematic oppression of the fairer sex was so deeply ingrained that it went unnoticed – masked as “normal” or “the way things are.” Calling out the indignities of our shared experience is a step in the right direction. And it’s a step we owe not only to ourselves, but to the generations of women who cried, often silently, long before we did.
Susan Walter is a screenwriter, film director, and author of four novels of suspense. Her book Letters from Strangers is a coming-of-age family drama inspired by true events. After graduating Harvard, she moved to Hollywood to work in the movie business but left her heart in Boston.
