Archiving #MeToo: Past, Present, and Future

Some say it began in October 2017, when an invitation to share experience of sexual harassment or assault with the hashtag #MeToo unleashed a social media tsunami, as well as revealing the ubiquity of sexual violation. Others point out that #MeToo was not new, that it had been more than a decade since Tarana Burke had created this hashtag and movement, specifically to connect women of color who had experienced abuse. Still others recall earlier campaigns to gather the collective power of women's voices—through #YesAllWomen in 2014, Take Back the Night rallies in the 1990s, and speak outs in the 1970s.

Of course, these claims are all both true and false. In nearly every historical period, women have found ways to give voice to their experiences (though they were not always heard), and such experiences are also finding new expression and attention today. The eyes and ears through which we in 2019 see, hear, and try to make sense of the reality of women's experiences need not only be trained on our contemporary context. Rather, one of the illuminating insights of #MeToo is recognition of the extent to which historic sexual violence has been so normalized as to go often unnoticed—and the need to offer new tellings of women's lives.

This is, in part, what the Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) set out to do when we launched our Archiving #MeToo project. In January 2018, JWA put out a call to collect the #MeToo stories of Jews, both within the Jewish community and outside of it.¹ With five simple prompts on a webform on JWA's site and in JWA's Story Aperture story-collecting mobile app, JWA aims to capture and preserve these stories in their breadth and diversity.² Though we're still in the early stages of this project, the 100+ testimonies we've collected thus far speak to the prevalence of harassment and abuse across generations, decades, and communities.

JWA initiated this collection to ensure that Jewish #MeToo accounts would outlive fleeting social media by being preserved in the permanent records of a historical organization, available to researchers and for future curation in public history initiatives.³ We also aimed to create a space separate from investigative or litigious efforts, where women could speak up (anonymously or not) and have their diverse experiences recorded for posterity, to know that their story was heard, counted, and preserved as part of the larger Jewish historical record.⁴

We knew that the stories of the Archiving #MeToo collection, taken together, would not only allow for witness of individual experiences but would illuminate the systems and structures that shape women's lives. Furthermore, as an archive collected in response to #MeToo, they exemplify not only women's victimization but also women's resilience and their collective power to make change. In other words, the #MeToo collection captures within it both the problem and the seeds of its solution.

While many submissions, for example, emphasize that "It's a mistake to think you're safer in a Jewish environment" (more on this below), others articulated a sense of newfound safety and confirmation found in #MeToo.⁵ "The MeToo movement means we're safer than we thought we could be. That what we feel is wrong IS wrong. And that we have the power to make it right."⁶

Another narrator explained the transformative impact of the #MeToo experience on her self-conception, framing her submission to JWA as if to a community of other women:

Sixteen years later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, a flood of sexual harassment stories followed, and, finally, I understood. What happened to me…was not my fault. It. Wasn't. My. Fault…I repeated this statement to myself. It wasn't my fault. Because until #MeToo, until I heard the stories of so many other women, until I grasped that there were still so many women like me with their stories untold, I didn't understand how a smart, capable woman like me could have let a boss and a board member talk to and treat me that...