E. Jean Carroll is sticking to her story. She’s the high-profile woman who is suing Donald Trump for allegedly raping her in the 1990s in a posh New York department store dressing room. Twenty-five other women have also accused the former president of sexual abuse and harassment and it’s no surprise that he’s denying all of them.

Now New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in trouble. As of March, seven women have accused him of sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct. Lindsey Boylan, a former aide to the governor, was the first to accuse Mr. Cuomo of “creating a culture of "sexual harassment and bullying." As a result of her allegations and others, he faces an independent investigation by the New York state no-nonsense attorney general Letitia James, who will lead the probe into the women’s claims.

But women whistleblowers aren’t just about exposing powerful machismo guys whose view of women resides in sexual fantasies. When Lilly Ledbetter learned that Goodyear, where she worked for nineteen years including as a sole female supervisor, was paying her less per year than men in supervisory positions, she filed a sex discrimination case that she won. However, that judgement was reversed by an appeals court because Goodyear lawyers argued that she hadn’t filed the suit in time. The case went to the Supreme Court where Ruth Bader Ginsberg declared, “Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time.” The case ultimately led to passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which is still practiced in the breach.

There are many other tales of notable, courageous women whistleblowers, none more well-known than Karen Silkwood, who claimed in the 1970s that Kerr-McGee, where she was a chemical technician, was not maintaining plant safety, and was involved in a number of unexplained dangerous exposures to plutonium. A member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers' Union and an activist, she gathered evidence for the Union to support her claims. She subsequently died in an unexplained, highly suspicious car accident.

Less well known are women like Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a senior policy analyst in the Environmental Protection Agency, who blew the whistle on the EPA for racial and gender discrimination in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after she was removed from her position in South Africa for bringing to EPA’s attention dangerous conditions in an American company that was exposing African workers to dangerous mining conditions. That case led to passage of the No-FEAR Act in 2002 that made federal agencies more accountable for employee complaints.

In 2005 former chief civilian contracting officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bunny Greenhouse, exposed illegality in the no-bid contracts for reconstruction in Iraq by a Halliburton subsidiary. The Army then retaliated against her by demoting her and removing her from her job as a high-level contractor. She subsequently testified before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee about her experience.

FBI whistleblower Jane Turner, an agent for 25 years, blew the whistle on the mishandling of child sex crime cases on North Dakota Indian Reservations, for which she was removed from her position. In 2005 a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Turner’s right to a jury trial against the FBI and the right to monetary damages. Turner also blew the whistle when she witnessed her colleagues stealing items from 9/11 Ground Zero during site inspections. She won a final judgement in 2007 when the Department of Justice vetoed the FBI’s appeal of a jury verdict that found the agency guilty of illegal retaliation against Turner. Her case was used by the U.S. Government Accounting Office and the U.S. Senate in improving the FBI Whistleblower Program.

Cathy Harris, a former U.S. Customs Service employee, exposed racial profiling against Black travelers at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta. Her book, Flying While Black: A Whistleblower’s Story, revealed numerous incidents of heinous abuses perpetrated against Black travelers, including body-cavity searches and long detention in local hospitals where they were subjected to bowel monitoring aimed at discovering drugs. Her book also revealed hideous abuses of authority in Customs Service practices and behaviors, including violence, racial and sexual harassment, stalking on and off the job, and a host of other violations and illegalities.

All whistleblowers are brave people who care deeply about the injustices they witness, experience or learn about. All of them are routinely subjected to humiliation, retaliation, and job loss that can impact their careers in devastating ways. But women whistleblowers often suffer in ways men don’t simply because they are female. They are less likely to be believed and more likely to have their reputations permanently damaged. They are called crazy and tagged as troublemakers. They are treated like pariahs by powerbrokers outside their own organizations because of the truths they tell.

All of that speaks to the courage they display when they risk revealing abuse, corruption, and illegality. It also speaks to why they deserve our respect, and gratitude, because in many instances they may literally be saving our lives.

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Finding Their Voices: Black Women Writers and Truthtellers

Last month was Black History Month and this one is Women’s History Month. What better time to honor women of color, who with other female writers, reveal the courage it takes to tell the truth about women’s lives through the written word?

The late poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked this now iconic question: “What would happen if just one woman told the truth about her life?” Her answer was: “The world would split open.” Historically silenced and admonished to be “good girls and fine ladies,” women who took up the pen in past centuries and decades were ignored, trivialized and punished, but many of them bravely broke with convention. Among them were black women writers whose courage, conviction and talent made a difference in a world where words can become verbal monuments.

Nineteenth century poet Phyllis Wheatley was born a slave in West Africa and seized at age seven. Luckily her Boston mistress taught her to read and write. At age 13 she published a poem that made her famous. By the age of 18 she’d written a poetry collection, published in London. In one poem she wrote, “Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”

Zora Neale Hurston, a Harlem newcomer in 1925, “knew how to make an entrance.” Rising above poverty, she became the most successful, significant black woman writer of the early 20th century. Writing prolifically in various genre, she is remembered for her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sadly, she died in poverty in 1960, age 69, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Florida. Alice Walker placed a marker there, and then resurrected Hurston’s work.

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, Alice Walker, is best known for her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, which explored female African-American experience through the life of its central character, Celie. Walker also wrote about the taboo topic of female genital cutting in her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, a tribute to her courage as part of the black feminist movement.

Toni Morrison, who died in 2019, saw books as “a form of political action.” Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, proved the point when it told the story of a young black girl obsessed with white standards of beauty. Her later novel, Beloved, based on a true slave narrative, won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing, through a woman’s life, the evils slavery wrought. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Fiction for “visionary force and poetic import, giving life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou shared the story of being raped by her mother’s boyfriend at age seven. Reading black authors Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois aided her recovery and she became Hollywood’s first female black director. In the 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild meeting James Baldwin and others. She became a civil rights movement leader, using her pen to write about relevant issues. Later she was the first black woman to have a screenplay produced. She is remembered for writing and reading the inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” for President Clinton.

Audre Lorde was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” whose work dealt with the struggles of ordinary people. She championed women breaking their silence, never better than in The Cancer Journals when post-mastectomy, a nurse admonished her for not wearing a prosthesis to help other women’s morale. Who, demanded Lorde, identifying as a warrior against cancer, told Moshe Dayan to remove his eye patch to make people feel better? She took on racism, sexism, classism and homophobia in her writing and her contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory addressed broad political issues. The iconic activist was the recipient of many awards and honors, and was New York’s poet laureate in 1991-2. She died of breast cancer shortly afterwards.

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, author and teacher, dealt with personal celebrations and struggling people. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 becoming the first African American to receive the Pulitzer. She was also the first black woman to be a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and she served as poet laureate of Illinois. Her work was often political, especially in regard to civil rights. Like Phyllis Wheatley, she was 13 when she published her first poem and was publishing regularly by age 18. She died in 2000.

Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat and Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deserve attention, among other non-American black women writers. Danticat writes about women’s relationships as well as issues of power, injustice, and poverty, and Adichie is said to be her generation’s Chinua Achebe, another noted Nigerian novelist. Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s first novel won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in 2005.

And now comes Amanda Gorman, who read her amazing inaugural poem at President Biden’s inauguration. Her first two books of poetry are already bestsellers before being in print.

That’s just a short list of black women writers. Imagine what else there is to discover in their work and that of other female truthtellers. And imagine what else is to come!

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Elayne Clift writes (and teaches) from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com