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Introduction: working the trap

A young woman from Kansas, a small-town girl, is making her way in New York City. As jobs vanish across the city, switched off like lights in so many skyscraper windows, she turns up to hers on time and in sample-sale gear. Finding herself bathed in the glow of her boss’s attentions as of her receptionist’s desk, the girl invents excuses to linger in the boss’s private office. She feels the thrill of superiority when he gossips with her about her co-workers: “[S]ome people,” he says, “were just born to be mice.” She imagines herself as the boss’s fiancée, and, when the other workers try to stand up to him over their shrinking pay checks, she plays his accomplice, sticking by him in her tailored suit, growing giddy with reflected power. The workers back down; the boss wins the day; and then, after music and drinks, the boss pins down the receptionist on the couch: “‘No, no, no,’ sobbed Betty Carlisle – but Peter Bender was the boss, and... it was not at all long before Betty Carlisle, who had never let the Kansas boys take liberties, had let the boss take the final liberty with her.” At the boss’s offer of payment in “nice clothes,” Betty becomes what she always was: just another mouse, caught in the trap of the office’s hierarchies. As she gathers her things and goes to leave, the boss shouts, “[D]on’t be such a little fool,... how in hell are we going to have any fun, how are we even going to get along in the same office, one of us will have to look for another job –.” Tess Slesinger’s short story, “The Mouse-Trap,” was first published in 1935, in a collection called Time: The Present – and its time, its present, feels strangely like our own. Our #MeToo moment, in which women and some men have spoken out about gendered harassment and violence in their workplaces and elsewhere, has always seemed to me to collapse several different timescales. With their ubiquitous time stamps and reverse chronological design, social media platforms accelerate away from a sense of history or context; we’re addicted to the downward swipe, the endless refresh. But just as hashtags are a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating expressions of shared sentiment or experience across time and space, so too #MeToo cuts against the perpetual present of the platforms on which it first became a rallying cry. It is a moment layered with other moments, slipping from Alyssa Milano’s popularizing gesture, in a viral tweet in October 2017, to Tarana Burke’s originary one, a decade earlier, which centered on the experiences of women of color. What’s more, the #MeToo movement sits with popular discourses around contemporary feminism that reflect a retrospection of second-wave feminist concerns. Several months before #MeToo began trending, Rebecca Solnit published “A Short History of Silences,” an essay that seemed uncannily to foreshadow the movement’s