Then she was with Art and in the working world—no longer at risk of teenage motherhood and able to choose and pay for her own birth control. Yet her body refused to cede control. Her first boss paid more attention to her ass than he did to her work. Her second boss asked if she’d sit on his face—and called her a humorless cunt when she reported him to HR. Guests at the hotels where she worked grabbed, groped, and fondled her. She watched men kiss their mistresses in the lobby, only to return the next week with their wives. On more than one occasion, while wearing a suit and button-down shirt, she was mistaken for an escort. No matter what Jo accomplished, her body—and those of the women around her—made her question what was truly valued.
That all ended when she got pregnant. The moment she began to show, the spotlight shut off and Jo disappeared. She’d dreaded pregnancy her entire life, only to find it was the respite she’d been waiting for. While her body was preoccupied and men turned their attention elsewhere, she managed a feat that her colleagues had long thought impossible.
A month before she announced her pregnancy, she was made staff manager at the hotel where she’d been working for two years. The promotion came as a surprise to Jo. Though she knew her performance had been exemplary, she’d struggled to catch senior management’s eye. Six hours after her new title was made public, a colleague informed her that it was considered as a dead-end position within the hospitality company that owned the hotel. Jo had convinced herself that was just jealous gossip when she received a phone call from a reporter at the New York Times. Was she aware, the reporter asked, that turnover among the hotel’s female workers was three times that of its male employees? Jo said she had seen nothing to suggest that was true and referred the reporter to the chief communications officer of the organization. The company’s C-suite knew all about the problem, the reporter informed her, and the problem was hardly unique to the New York location. Staff managers seemed to make convenient scapegoats whenever stockholders or the media took notice. Where did she imagine her predecessor had gone? If Jo cared to discuss the issue in the future, the reporter said, she would gladly make herself available.
That night, Jo went through the HR files and realized it was true. Fifteen women had quit in the previous year alone. Thirteen had signed NDAs and were sent home with several months’ pay in their pockets. Two had filed suit against the hotel for failing to protect them from known sexual predators. The blunt reports of harassment and assault turned Jo’s stomach. A room-service waitress had been held hostage in a bathroom for hours. A member of the cleaning staff had barely escaped being raped by a guest. Jo made careful copies of all the files. She wanted it to stop, and if it didn’t, she’d use them. The previous managers valued the guests and considered employees expendable. The women Jo worked with were worth something to her.
The next day, Jo introduced a handful of new policies. Going forward, the cleaning staff would work in teams of three. No woman would ever enter a guest’s room on her own. Room service to male guests would be delivered by men. Female employees would see to the women guests. Guests who harassed waitresses in the hotel’s restaurants and bars would be flagged and served by male staff—the buffer, the better. Those who managed to do it twice would be banned.
It seemed so obvious, and too easy. Surely, Jo thought, similar policies had failed in the past. But in the six months after Jo put her plan into motion, no female staff members resigned. No hush money was paid and no new lawsuits were filed. When she first found out she was pregnant, she’d worried about being laid off following maternity leave. It happened, she’d noticed, more often than not. Instead, she was welcomed back with a promotion. The policies she’d introduced in New York had saved the corporation so much money that they were being instituted around the world. Within two years, Jo was general manager of the Manhattan hotel.
Jo’s body did not welcome this development. After a yearlong truce, it returned to battle with a vengeance. The periods that had long been unpredictable trickles of blood were now torrents. For three days in a row, Jo would pass multiple clots the size of plums, each filled with enough blood to overwhelm an ultra-size tampon and a mattress-thick pad. Her gynecologist assured her she wasn’t dying. It was a common problem—a common problem, Jo noted out loud, for which no gynecologists had bothered to find a solution. She wondered how other women managed to survive in workplaces without hundreds of toilets. At least once a month, Jo found herself slipping into an empty guest room with just seconds to spare before her body released a horror movie’s worth of gore. She knew the day would come when she wouldn’t make it on time, so she kept a change of clothes tucked behind some files in her bottom desk drawer. When anemia drained her will to live every month, she swallowed iron supplements and devoured chopped liver to get through the day. She learned the location of every public bathroom between work and home. She discovered it was possible—though uncomfortable—to wear two tampons at once. She looked forward to cold weather, when a winter coat would hide anything that might leak through her pants.