The Book of Joe by Jeff Wilser

Author:Jeff Wilser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

In 1991, Patricia Ireland was the acting president of the National Organization of Women (NOW). “This is not to say that there’s anything good about the Thomas hearings,” she says, “but there were a whole lot of women in this country who saw the hearings, and who had experienced sexual harassment, and started talking about it. And then there were men who loved these women, and they heard these stories, and they started talking about it. Husbands, brothers, fathers. There was an explosion of public consciousness.” Her NOW offices received so many calls that she had to install a new switchboard. She says it’s not a coincidence that 1992 would be labeled “The Year of the Woman,” with the election of four women U.S. senators: Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, Carol Moseley Braun, and Dianne Feinstein.

Something else seemed to change, too: There was more willingness to talk about domestic violence against women. Biden’s staffer charged with spearheading the Violence Against Women Act, Victoria Nourse, says she noticed the shift. “The country changed, and the Senate changed, after Anita Hill,” says Nourse. “Women made themselves quite clear—that [hearing] was a mess.” She says that helped open the minds, and ears, of other male senators. The votes were more gettable. In the background, Biden’s team had continued work on what would become a three-year investigation into the deeper causes of violence against women. They hatched a report designed to evoke real emotions, and to focus on something specific: Violence Against Women: A Week in the Life of America, with involvement from both Democratic senators (including Ted Kennedy) and Republicans (including Orrin Hatch).

The report was unflinching. It found that in 1991, there were at least 21,000 domestic crimes against women…every week. “These figures reveal a total of at least 1.1 million assaults, aggravated assaults, murders, and rapes against women committed in the home and reported to the police,” Biden writes in the introduction. Yet he knew that statistics alone wouldn’t shake people to act. He wanted to look at “the human face” behind the numbers. From the report:

A twenty-six-year-old Connecticut woman is attacked by her boyfriend of five years; he breaks her right arm with a hammer.

A forty-six-year-old New Mexico woman is beaten and pushed out of a moving car by her husband. She spends three days in the hospital recovering from a broken tailbone and other injuries.

A Texas woman is stabbed in her apartment by a stranger who enters through sliding glass doors in the middle of the night.

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