Recently a young woman was telling me about how she had once worked in a certain business establishment but left because the men were gaslighting the women employees and even though it was the first time I heard of gaslighting I knew what she meant; I had seen the movie. However, my friend had not; Gaslight is from my generation, not hers. Indeed, she had barely heard of the movie. Gaslighting was simply the word everyone she knew used to describe such circumstances. The following day, watching a news program on television, a woman reporting on sexual harassment in the work place spoke of gaslighting; it has become an ordinary word.
Gaslighting is similar to but stronger than the phrase I heard from the 1960s-70s generation, something like “he’s messing with her mind.” In the past, people certainly thought about such situations but had no vocabulary for reifying and contesting them. It was assumed that men would dominant women and pushing a woman around psychologically was considered normal, if not nice. Gaslight is from that past, from the 1940s. It was a time when, quoting from this excellent film site, a large number of noir, gothic, melodramatic movies had the theme of a sheltered woman who is menaced, threatened, or at least frightened by a deranged man. The 1940s was early for me but I saw a number of the movies later, in the 1950s, when I was in my twenties, including Jane Eyre (1943), Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Laura (1944), The Spiral Staircase (1945), And, of course, Gaslight.
Not many films have their title enter the language in such a socially significant manner.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2017, Ben Yagoda wrote that the American Dialect Society, while choosing the Word of the Year, selected to gaslight as winner in the category of “Most Useful/Likely to Succeed.” They defined to gaslight as “to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity.” Yagoda continues in the article to give a history of how, beginning in the 1950s, gaslighting has been used by various public personalities in print and on television.
In the December 10, 2016 issue of Teen Vogue magazine, in an article, “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America,” Lauren Duca wrote that since the rise of social media, of smart phones, Facebook and its imitators, of instant communication, gaslighting has been the word of choice for teenage girls and young women when describing how ex-boyfriends have tried to mess with their heads, and she continues with a discussion showing that from the time when Donald Trump began his campaign for President, and was elected, the use in the media of the verb to gaslight has increased enormously. She states that Trump won the Presidency by gaslighting the public and supports her point with examples and an analysis of the consequences.
An article in a technology and science magazine accuses the food industry of gaslighting the public on the harm of heavy use of sugar.
Returning to The Chronicle of Higher Education — In 1951, Solomon Asch, social psychologist, conducted a series of experiments in which a person, the Subject, sat in a room with other people. The Experimenter showed them four lines – Line A and a set of three other lines, one of which was the same length as Line A – and asked them all to identify the line among the three that matched line A. The Subject chose the correct line but the other persons, having been primed by the Experimenter and part of the experiment, all agreed on one of the incorrect lines as being the same as Line A. Of the 50 Subjects who did the experiment, 37 decided that the others in the room were correct. Most admitted afterwards that they had not agreed with the majority but had gone along to avoid being ostracized. To understand the Subject’s motivation: “Suppose you go to a fancy dinner party and notice to your dismay that there are four forks beside your plate. When the first course arrives, you are not sure which fork to use. If you are like most people, you look around and use the fork everyone else is using. You do this because you want to be accepted by the group and because you assume the others know more about table etiquette than you do.” The Subject was being gaslighted, and most of the Subjects conformed to the group but did not lose their grip on reality.
In other such experiments, if just one person agreed with the Subject, the Subject person could resist conforming to the majority. This, I think, is encouraging. It shows the importance of having an ally and of getting information to people in a way that is relevant to them. Of course, an emotionally disturbed individual with no friends is vulnerable to a single negative influence, but that is another matter.
A small number of the Subjects in the experiments were truly convinced by the majority that they were seeing incorrectly. These are the individuals at great risk for serious gaslighting and psychological damage. In the real world “ … (The) victim must be somehow emotionally cathected (deeply attached) to (the bully). Thus a beloved husband can gaslight his wife; thus a charismatic dictator can gaslight many of his subjects. By fostering insecurity, by loudly asserting as truth various “facts” and narratives that make no sense, the gaslighter gains a kind of emotional access that will eventually trump his victims’ reasoning. … ” (no pun intended)
A Hotline is available in the U.S. to victims of domestic violence. A national organization of highly trained experts on the sort of violence that can happen in the home, mostly against women and children, keep a telephone service that anyone may call at any hour to receive useful, helpful information and advice.
Returning to the movie – A British Gaslight, based on a stage play, was released in 1940 but the 1944 Hollywood version, directed by George Cukor, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer became the box office success and it won Oscars.
Touches like this add to the 1944 Gaslight: The set decoration is by Paul Huldchinsky, a German refugee who borrowed elements from the German expressionist style to make the house cluttered and stifling and give it a claustrophobic jail-like atmosphere. The movie received an Oscar for interior decoration. For depicting the broader Victorian period environment, the 1940 version is considered more effective.
I saw Gaslight many years ago, so I watched it again on-line. Obviously, the atmospherics are much better on the big screen, but Gaslight is a good movie, and even without the current interest in its title and theme, the story and the acting still would have engaged me.
How could Paula, played by Bergman, be so easily and seriously gaslighted? The answer lies in her vulnerability as an inexperienced and isolated young woman. Moreover, she had fallen in love with a charming, clever, authoritative father-figure of a man considerably older than she, and he, by hiring particular household servants, constructed an environment that he alone controlled. Her vulnerability began when she was still a child, about twelve years old, and her aunt, her guardian and only family, was murdered in their London home. Paula heard but did not see it happen. She never recovered from the trauma she suffered from the event. Her isolation began when she was sent, immediately after the death, to live in Italy under the protection of a kindly, elderly maestro whose responsibility it was to train her as an opera star. Unfortunately, she doubted her talent and she lacked motivation. The story is set in a time when and in a place where girls did not venture out into public without family. (I wonder about the social status of a woman opera singer in that era but that matter is totally ignored.) Paula had wealth but no family and, apparently, no friends or companions. Not until the end did she have that one essential ally.
I like this bright, witty review and it’s many photographs from the movie.
In this review, also with photographs, the two film versions of Gaslight are discussed and compared. It is excellent and a good read.
It did not occur to me, seeing Gaslight in the 1950s, that this man’s bullying of his wife was a theatrical expression of a fairly common pattern of behavior, one we could more easily recognize and act on after it had a name. It took psychotherapists to first name it and today’s young women to bring the word into our vocabulary. I wrote here, toward the end of the essay, about the teenage stage of life as a fairly recent social phenomenom, of the rise of women in public life and of the social revolution we are experiencing. The invention and widespread use of a word like gaslighting is yet another instance of how our world is changing – both in private life and in the way we perceive, think and talk about our societies’ leaders.
Iris sans frontières 
Norma Rae, bringing back a great and still relevant movie
Posted in Caste in America, Comments on interesting movies, Words on May 26, 2017| 1 Comment »
I find it difficult these days to concentrate on my past, on my memories, and writing about them seems particularly irrelevant. Instead, endlessly I read and listen to news reports and political analyses, obsessed with the crises Donald Trump is creating in and for the American government. I believe Trump and the people he brings into office are a danger to America’s democracy and economy, maybe also to other countries’ well being.
And I worry about what is happening to young people. They face a job market where wages are abominable.
Since 2000, the hourly wage of the median worker rose just 0.5%, while productivity increased by nearly 23%. From 1979 to 2011, wages for the median worker grew by 6%, wages for the highest-earning 5% rose by nearly 38%, and for the top 1% they rose by 131%. For the lowest paid workers, wages actually fell during those years. Nearly one-third of women, compared to nearly a quarter of men, earned poverty-level wages in 2011. For more statistics, check here. But know that this sort of inequality has happened before in capitalist democracies and has been reversed through collective action by the workers. In the 1930s my grandfather and father worked as unskilled, low-paid laborers in a steel mill, in a dangerous setting, for long hours six days a week. They joined with other workers and formed a union. Unions transformed the society and the economy.
Nevertheless, very few reviews of Norma Rae are available on-line and the reason why is explained in this excellent summary of the story Matt Langdon wrote in 2011. “This is a classic 1970’s film that successfully blends a feminist component with the typical management labor struggle that have existed in factories and mills since the 19th century.
It’s an important subject but more than 20 years after it was made it continues to have a bad rap with mainstream audiences. Mainly because it is a feminist film, a pro-labor film as well as one that is very class conscious and takes place in a small southern town. All these things, though, make “Norma Rae” a unique Hollywood film since its kind wouldn’t be made today. … …”
An early meeting
I like this detailed summary of the plot, but certain expressions need to be explained. For example, “balled out” should be “bawled” out, meaning to shout at and scold someone. In the last paragraph, regarding the expression: “And boy that Sally Field really did an excellent job.” I no longer hear “boy” used to emphasize an idea. When I was young the expression was “boy oh boy.” Perhaps the original meaning was from buoy (same pronunciation), a devise that bloats on the water and serves to warn people of a hazard, such as a reef. The buoy often had a bell attached. As a verb, buoy or buoy up can mean to boost or increase. For another slang expression: “And the Flying Nun was looking pretty sharp in the film.” “Looking pretty sharp” means looking bright and very pleasing. Flying Nun refers to a television series Sally Fields starred in.
I love this video clip from the movie. It expresses why the union was important to ordinary people.
The events in the movie took place in 1974, at a time when the textile industry was already unionized, nationally, except for this one company, J.P. Stevens.
The turning point
The U.S. Congress had passed laws to protect the right of workers to unionize, but by keeping its workers from knowing about the law and worker rights, the J.P. Stevens company was able to keep worker wages low and their work conditions dangerous to health. In one dramatic scene we see Norma Rae’s bosses harassing her as she copies a paper posted on the factory’s bulletin board. Management had written it to frighten the White workers. The paper states that if the workers formed a union, the Blacks would run it, which is untrue, and under national civil rights law such a prejudiced assertion is illegal. The company is gaslighting the workers.
The woman, Crystal Lee Sutton, on whom Norma Rae is based is described here. She was pleased with the movie’s interpretation of her union activities and of her life.
This article is by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was sent in 1974 to North Carolina to report on efforts to unionize the workers in large textile mills. It is a lengthy discussion of struggles between the textile companies and the unions, including the movie’s unionization, and of the government’s involvement in settling disputes.
Finally, my memory of union country — In the 1940s, I lived for three years with my White Anglo-Saxon Protestant working class grandparents (described here) in Ohio. Like many small town White Christian working-class girls, I never heard the word “Jew” outside of Bible studies at church and was quite unaware of anyone in my high school being Jewish. The Negro community in the South (“Negro” being the polite word at that time) was a large minority, unequal and living segregated from the Whites, except as servants. (described here in The Help) In my Ohio town the Negro community was small and socially invisible to most Whites. The high school was integrated and I chatted with a few Black kids in the classroom but social segregation reigned. (a note here on sports and Black/White school integration.) My circle of friends included children of Catholic families who had come in the early 20th century as immigrants to the northern U.S., rarely to the South, from southern and eastern Europe, and although Grandmother and Granddad disapproved of the Catholic Church they reluctantly accepted my visiting with families they found so different from themselves. I was always curious about different people and asked Granddad to tell me where the Negro children lived and why nasty words like Dago and Wop were used for people from Italy and other strange places. He said, “We don’t talk about that.” End of discussion.
His non-answer, so unlike him, puzzled me, but I now think his silence had to do with the union. Granddad and Grandmother personally held the standard racial and ethnic prejudices but did not like to say negative things against other people. To avoid unpleasantness they, in their own words, stayed with their own kind. However, Black men and men of the new ethnic communities were in the union with Granddad. They had been on the picket line together, together they fought the company and its well organized, well financed supporters. They had won and together elected leaders, fought for decent wages and safe working conditions, followed union principles and acted as one. The union saw to it that Grandmother had a nice, affordable place to live when she was widowed. My grandparents had no vocabulary for a rationale discussion of the inconsistencies between their union identity and social differences in the larger society, so they choose not to talk about it. They believed in the union and were faithful to its ethic of collective identity and action. I think it taught them tolerance. In later years, although not always comfortable with it, they accepted my stepping out into a diverse world. They even accepted my marrying a foreign student from India, without going so far as to include his photograph among the family photos on the top of the piano in the living room.
Apparently, the unions that built middle-class America are dead, gone. I read that Americans have reached the (incorrect) conclusion that organizing workers is counterproductive. If so, this has to be changed.
As an addendum — In a fascinating, well written article, “Confronting the Parasite Economy,” in the American Prospect magazine, Nick Hanauer, an extraordinarily successful businessman, presents his view of the economy and of wage scales, of what is wrong with both and why and how they should be changed. His ideas are controversial among economists but I find them convincing.
Hanauer’s argument is that in the U.S. we have two types of businesses – (1) businesses in the real economy that pay their workers decent middle-class wages and (2) parasite businesses that pay unjustly, economically unnecessarily low wages. The cost is high for taxpayers working in the real economy because the majority of the money we collectively pay for anti-poverty programs goes not to poor people without jobs; it goes to low-wage workers who must rely on government welfare programs to survive. Our tax money supports the working poor employed by parasite businesses — businesses that keep wages low because they can, not because it is necessary for running a profitable business but because they have total power over their employees. Parasite businesses are bad for the economy; they reduce their workers’ ability to buy goods and services from businesses in the real economy and prevent those workers from contributing to the nation’s economic growth. And the wrongs the parasite businesses create for the society … … too numerous to list.
The solution is collective action. Governments should raise the minimum wage, which entails raising citizen awareness of the negative effects of poverty-level wages. Mostly, we need a rebirth of unions to increase wages, improve working conditions and bring individuals from diverse communities together in collective action. With our nation’s growing ethnic diversity, bringing people together for collective action is especially important for our democracy.
Addendum 2 — An important study indicates that the growing income inequality in the U.S. is caused in large part by a politically induced decline in the strength of worker unions. Unions reduce pay differences within companies and unions lobby in the federal and state governments on behalf of the working and middle classes for better education, better health services and generally for a strong public social infrastructure. Union decline, and the decline in public infrastructure, has come from business-financed political conservatives who spread misinformation and successfully lobby Congress to pass laws that make it difficult for workers to unionize. When in my mid-forties, in the 1970s, I did an M.B.A, in the Kellogg School. The hostility many of the student expressed toward unions, and toward workers, surprised me. How different from the small business people I had known for whom employees were people, not factors of production requiring cost control.
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