Drawing the Line in ‘North Country’

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / December 2005 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

“North Country,” A Participant film, directed by Niki Caro. Produced by Nick Wechsler, screenplay by Michael Seitzman. Starring Charlize Theron, Francis McDormand, Sean Bean, and Woody Harrelson.

You are a young, unemployed woman from some Northern boondocks; you’ve been smacked around by the father of your youngest child till your face looks like an overripe plum. You leave, move back in with your folks and get a filthy, backbreaking job in an iron mine swabbing black ore from walls and floors. Still, it allows you to pay your own way.

It follows that you would call the town’s step-above-Denny’s eatery a “nice restaurant,” while treating your kids to dinner. There, the mine owner comes over and introduces himself. He makes nice with the kids, then tells you if you have any problems at all to come talk to him.

Some of us have been there and in our naiveté done that: It doesn’t work.

Such is the life of Josey Ames (Charlize Theron), in Niki Caro’s new film “North Country,” loosely based on the 2003 book by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler, “Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law.” The case against Eveleth

Mines, which the book and film document, began in 1984 and ended in a 1998 trial, though the film makes it seem like it went on only for a short time.

In the same vein as films “Norma Rae” and “Silkwood,” “North Country” raises issues of working-class women in industrial jobs.

On her first day on the job, which Josey’s former high-school friend, Glory (Frances McDurmond), helped her get, Josey’s supervisor right away mouths off with a coarse sexist remark, followed by, “Sense of humor, ladies; rule numero uno!”

Because of her past experiences with men, she quickly loses any sense of humor she may have had. She finds sexist slurs and crude genitalia graffiti scratched on the women’s dressing-room walls and lockers, and rubber penises popping up out of lunchboxes. Male workers sidle up to the women and whisper vulgar sexual suggestions while rubbing against them.

Josey is shocked and dismayed that her female co-workers don’t complain. And once she starts airing her grievances, the shit literally hits their walls in the form of crudely-lettered slurs.

That the film treads a little too lightly on the sexual harassment issue can be traced to a statement made by director Niki Caro: “The story investigates a gray area of male/female interaction and the gradations between the innocuous and the offensive. What happens to Josey and her colleagues has a cumulative effect [which is] explore[d] from many angles….”

“These are issues of actions and responses,” she goes on, “that are part of human nature. A man tells a dirty joke, a woman tells a dirtier one, then there is an explicit remark or maybe something physical . . . at what point does this do damage? Where do you draw the line?”

Still, some contend that “North Country” has served to jump-start aggressive inquiries into prevailing social imbalances. Statistics show that one in three women in the United States will be abused either domestically or in the workplace in her lifetime. Unfortunately, too many victims and witnesses will not speak out, which only allows such violence to flourish.

Simply because Josey Ames was handed a check at film’s end doesn’t mean the matter has ended. Sexual harassment remains the big gorilla in every room, from the jerkwater office or retail store to the corporate boardroom.

Some blame sexual harassment on economic factors. The situation in the Eveleth Mines was such that from 1980 to ’82 the mine’s workforce was cut in half due to inefficiency, high costs, and exorbitant energy use per ton of taconite ore. As the “Class Action” authors stated, “With so few jobs to go around, hostility at the mine increased toward the women who had enough seniority to keep their jobs.”

Josey reaches the breaking point when she is roughly groped by a male co-worker on top of a pile of taconite. She gets local lawyer Bill White (Woody Harrelson) to take her sexual harassment case against the mine. He advises her to get two women to join her to make it a class-action suit, but they turn against her, even Glory, the only female union member at the mine. She proceeds with the case, alone.

An interesting aspect of the film shows Josey watching the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings on television, inspiring her to act.

Once at trial, Josey suffers emotional and psychological humiliation and verbal abuse when her personal life is attacked by the mine’s female attorney, an assault about as horrific as the sexual aggression she endured on the job.

The real Josey, Lois Jenson, described her more than a decade of torture during the trial. Quoted in the Gansler/Bingham book, she said, “I felt naked on the stand. The atmosphere in the courtroom was just like being at Eveleth Mines. I felt like a criminal.”

In the film, matters take a rosy turn for Josey when her father, Hank (Richard Jenkins), a long-term Eveleth employee, stands up for her. Then Glory gets on board, and when other women join her, Josey has her class-action suit.

Unfortunately, in 30 years of similar lawsuits, court rulings, and private settlements, the situation has not improved for women in mostly blue-collar jobs. Many million-dollar-plus settlements have been won against auto plants, manufacturing companies, and corporations from the 1970s to the present—forcing some companies to clean up their act. But women continue to be degraded and demoralized.

An important aspect that the film does not address is the psychological and emotional damage that sexual harassment can cause, resulting in such debilitating illnesses as psychosis, depression, and/or post-traumatic stress disorder, rendering some women so disabled they are unable ever to work again. Others change careers entirely. A lengthy trial can lead to further harm.

Women seek jobs in male-oriented fields for the pay, since they can’t live or raise a family on minimum wages as waitresses, retail clerks, or office drudges. They want equal pay with men who are routinely paid two to three times as much as women. It is often the case that men will purposely and openly harass women to keep them out of the workforce. Those who quit swear they will never go back into a male-dominated field.

It is ironic that at the time of the release of “North Country,” a film that focuses on the success of a sexual harassment class-action suit, the Bush administration, with bipartisan support, has signed into law a measure that will make it extremely difficult for consumers and workers to file such lawsuits against companies or corporations for damages brought about by corporate malfeasance.

Contrary to what Hollywood would have us believe, as touted in the end-notes of “North Country,” there never has been an era of great judicial achievement in the United States—in which the rights of women and the oppressed were truly safeguarded.