Every so often I come across some new story that just rocks my world in a “How am I just hearing about this?” way.
Last week I learned about Martha Mitchell.
Martha Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general.
Martha was a southern lady from Arkansas. She talked a lot and drank perhaps too much. She had a likable, folksy, opinionated way about her.
When she heard some juicy piece of news that she thought the American people needed to know, she would call the press. The press loved her. The American people loved her. Richard Nixon? He did not.
She was “The Martha Problem.”
And she became more of a problem. She was in California when she learned of the Watergate break-in and immediately tried to call the press. She knew that Nixon was in on it. She knew.
Her husband’s security detail caught her, ripped the phone out of the wall, had her tranquilized, and held her against her will for days.
As time went on, as she tried to tell that she knew this was big, even her husband tried to pass her off as off her rocker. She had become unhinged, he said.
Nobody believed her. Until they did. Until the evidence backed her up.
This was the 70s, of course. A time when women weren’t listened to. Weren’t believed. And were written off as unhinged on a regular basis.
In the early 70s Diane Langberg was a fresh young psychologist. She would sit and listen as women began sharing with her stories their stories of sexual abuse. Abuse she had never encountered in her own life. Abuse she had never read about in any literature. Abuse she had never been taught about in her pursuit of 2 graduate degrees. As she remembers, “Often counselors were warned to not get ‘hooked’ into believing hysterical women. I chose not to heed the advice.”
She believed them anyway.
Diane Langberg went on to become perhaps the foremost Christian authority on sexual abuse.
Martha Mitchell died a short few years after the Watergate scandal. Perhaps her most lasting legacy is the phenomena that bears her name: The Martha Mitchell Effect.
According to the National Institutes of Health, “The Martha Mitchell effect describes a paradox in psychiatric evaluation where clinicians mislabel patients’ truthful accounts as delusions because they seem implausible from a clinical perspective, which can result in misdiagnosis and harm.”
What must it have been like to be Martha Mitchell? To be disbelieved? Silenced? Even told you are crazy?
What must it have been like for women in the 70s to have a therapist who, unlike Diane Langberg, chose not to believe your stories of abuse and passed you off as hysterical?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of us know what that’s like. Because we’ve been there.
The sad reality is that not a lot has changed in 50+ years. Women are still written off as too emotional, perhaps unhinged. Our experiences are still disbelieved. Our concerns are still dismissed.
Last fall I was spending the night with my granddaughter when I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of gun shots. I considered calling 911 but found myself hesitant. I didn’t want to be accused of making a big deal out of nothing, of making a mountain out of a mole hill. I didn’t want to be another “hysterical woman.” I didn’t call.
The next morning there were 6 bullet casings in front of my daughter’s house.
Years of being dismissed take their toll. We women know this well. We are all too often left to the same fate as Cassandra of Greek mythology, who was cursed with the ability to tell the future but never believed. It crushes the soul.
Something has got to change. But what? How?
Maybe it starts small. With taking each other seriously. Believing each other. Maybe what we all need is a little validation that we aren’t crazy after all.
Martha Mitchell finally got that, if not before her death, then certainly after it.
An anonymous person sent flowers to her burial. White roses spelled out the phrase:
Martha Was Right.
