Elizabeth Cobbs is a professor emerita at San Diego State University and the author of “Fearless Women: Feminist Patriots from Abigail Adams to Beyoncé.”
On Wednesday, the New York Times published its findings that César Chavez exploited his powerful position as leader of the United Farm Workers of America in the 1960s and 1970s to rape girls and women. The allegations shocked many who have long regarded him as a labor union hero. I was not surprised. Many men on the left in the 1960s and 1970s sexually targeted followers in the name of justice, civil rights and even feminism. They told victims to be silent or risk damaging the so-called movement. I know this as a professional historian — and because it happened to me as a teenager.
Look anywhere on the history of the left and you’ll spot the attitudes that undergirded this phenomenon. Eldridge Cleaver, spokesman for the Black Panther Party, told women in 1968 that they could best help the movement with their “pussy power.” Prominent anti-Vietnam War activist Abbie Hoffman announced that the only alliance he would make with feminists was in bed. Stokely Carmichael declared that the sole position for women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was “prone.”
The Times reported that Dolores Huerta, who had been Chavez’s “most prominent ally in the movement,” now says, after decades of silence, that he raped her in 1966. The paper’s investigation uncovered on-the-record allegations that included Chavez’s rape of a 13-year-old girl who had been inspired by his union leadership. He was 45 years old at the time, the Times reported. He died in 1993 at age 66.
Sadly, a philosophical basis for the sexual exploitation of women and girls on the left was provided by some progressive thinkers, beginning with Sigmund Freud. The Austrian founder of psychoanalysis counseled female victims of paternal sexual assault that the problem was in their heads. They “wanted” their fathers and thus falsely accused them. Biologist Alfred Kinsey thrilled the world with his 1948 book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” Less well remembered is his 1953 book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” in which he wrote that girl children would not naturally object to adult men fondling their genitals except for their mothers’ prudish Victorian values.
I was 14, and then 16, when two men, celebrated local activists, initiated sex with me in 1971 and 1973. As self-proclaimed feminists, they helped me flee home at 14 to escape the working-class father who had raped me repeatedly since age 10. For me, getting away from home was real progress. I was grateful to both of these well-educated men, just as many of César Chavez’s victims were grateful to him for defending the poor. Chavez stood up for girls like them — then betrayed them. This was the price they paid for the help he gave their community.
The price can be hard to see, the abuse hard to admit. The man who abused me the longest was a professor almost 30 years my senior. He was a campus leader of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and widely esteemed. When I first met him, he had two secret mistresses, in addition to his wife.
He helped find me an attorney to sue my parents, then asked for sex. I nonetheless became a dedicated activist and at 23 received the 1980 John D. Rockefeller International Youth award for a “significant contribution to mankind.” The day after Jane Pauley interviewed me about the honor on the “Today Show,” I told him I no longer wanted a secret relationship. He slapped me in the face to keep me in line. I assumed I deserved it. He was a movement hero, after all.
Anyone who has never been sexually assaulted will undoubtedly wonder why victims take so “long” to report abuse. The thing is, many would rather die first — and some do. Speaking only for myself, it has taken most of my lifetime to admit that men of such high ideals criminally exploited me. After all, they were the very first people to tell me about women’s and children’s rights.
By swearing me to secrecy before I could even legally drive, they held my hopes for social progress hostage, in effect daring me to hurt the cause. Just as the left continued to support President Bill Clinton despite evidence of his sexual predation, so, too, does the right now remain steadfast behind President Donald Trump despite a jury verdict against him for sexual abuse. (An appeals court affirmed the verdict and Trump has sought review from the U.S. Supreme Court.)
The United States faces a reckoning that is as imperative on the left as it is on the right if we are to find our way back to national sanity. Truth has no party.
Revolutionary firebrand John Adams told his wife, Abigail, in a 1776 letter that he could “but laugh” when she asked him to champion laws that would prevent men from abusing women “with impunity.” He accused her of undermining their fight for independence.
Women and children have too often come last since 1776. Once and for all, their dignity and rights should come first.
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