–DONNA WESTMORELAND GRUNDBERG, 28 a compensation analyst in Chicago
She has no reason to lie and he has every reason to lie. Thomas was playing the sitcom “angry man.”
–KATE LEDFORD, 41 a library administrator in New York
After modern history’s nastiest Supreme Court confirmation fight came a close last week, new justice Clarence Thomas declared it was now “a time for healing.” But that won’t be easy. Anita Hill’s testimony opened wounds in the deepest parts of America’s collective psyche, revealing divisions of class and race as well as gender. Polls found that a majority of the women surveyed (as well as a majority of the men) did not believe Hill’s story. Still others saw the episode as powerful proof that women’s grievances will never be taken seriously in a male-driven society. “We have been in the middle of a cultural war for a long time, and it will get uglier before there’s a resolution,” says Faye Wattleton, president of Planned Parenthood and a Thomas opponent.
While America searched its soul, politicians looked for ways to capitalize on the forces unleashed by the Senate hearings. The White House expertly exploited the divisions (page 26) while Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, says Vicki McLennan, chief lobbyist for Georgia’s National Organization for Women, acted like “a bunch of possums caught in the headlights.” Betrayed by the Democrats and alienated from the Republicans, women’s groups last week issued a new call to arms and threatened to unseat senators who voted to confirm Thomas.
Feminists have long disputed the charge that they are out of touch with the concerns of average women. But the willingness to believe Hill’s testimony seemed to divide along class lines. While a Los Angeles Times poll found no significant differences among working and nonworking women, education and professional standing proved a cutting edge: 31 percent of college-educated women opposed Thomas’s confirmation, compared with 19 percent of nongrads. Nothing expressed that schism better than the testimony of J. C. Alvarez, Thomas’s assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Alvarez portrayed Hill as an ambitious, arrogant careerist, while she herself came across as Everywoman. Many working-class women simply couldn’t believe that Hill would tolerate sexual harassment. “A lot of women out there are quite comfortable telling a guy to knock it off,” says Suzanne Fields, a conservative columnist for The Washington Times. Hill “had all these privileges. They couldn’t believe she was a shrinking violet. They rejected her as a victim.”
In a sense, the decision about whom to believe depended on whether the listener wished to see Thomas on the court. For some blacks who looked forward to the appointment of one of their own, Hill’s testimony created a loyalty test. Thomas himself turned up the heat when he accused the Senate of a “high-tech lynching” and suggested he was a victim of sexual stereotypes. “Many black men see black women as aggressive man-haters, and black women are sensitive to that image,” says Diana Hayes, an assistant professor of theology at Georgetown University. In a poll of her black women students, Hayes found an even split between those who felt their primary allegiance was to Thomas as a black and those who believed women should be protected from sexual harassment. Even among Americans who believed Hill, there were those who thought it was unfair to derail Thomas with decade-old charges.
Ultimately, Hill became a contestant in a prime-time popularity contest she couldn’t win. The professor delivered her testimony in a dispassionate, lawyerly way; Thomas’s fiery delivery may have drowned out Hill’s message. “The absence of emotion makes people suspect,” says Thomas Kochman, author of “Black and White Styles in Conflict.” Viewers who found Hill utterly credible themselves were not necessarily surprised that so many women accepted Thomas’s version of events. Defense lawyers in rape cases are often eager to have women on the jury because, says Vivian Berger, vice dean of the Columbia University School of Law and a former sex-crimes prosecutor, “many women tend to be more judgmental about the purported victim than men.”
Enraged and embittered, liberal women plan to use the events of the last week to inspire long-term changes in the political process. “What women have realized is that we’re politically homeless,” says Wendy Kaplan, a Boston lawyer who specializes in sexual-harassment cases. Women disgusted by the way-both Democrats and Republicans behaved during the hearings may now feel disenfranchised, but that attitude could leave them out in the cold. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter would be a prime target for liberals, but so far his only Democratic opponent in the ‘92 race is the state’s right-to-life lieutenant governor. Georgia Sen. Wyche Fowler, who antagonized liberals when he voted aye last week, will also most likely face a conservative candidate. “The choices are to vote for a right-wing conservative or sit out the election,” says Alan Abramowicz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “Both are self-defeating strategies.”
Feminists have periodically concluded that their only hope lies with a women’s political party. Last week activists again tried to rally the sisters, but it’s unlikely such plans will come to fruition. Instead, women candidates from the main parties could become the big winners. “Their fundraising base just got a shot in the arm,” says Democratic activist Ann Lewis. Political strategists agree that the Thomas proceedings intensified anti-incumbent sentiment in the country-and that women will be able to turn it to their own advantage. Because they are political outsiders, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, they can present themselves as “part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
Meanwhile liberal activists are determined to make Thomas’s supporters feel their pain. Last week direct-mail specialist Roger Craver canceled his contract with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to protest chairman Charles Robb’s pro-Thomas vote. But political episodes, however searing at the time, have a remarkably short shelf life. So while angry women turned up at rallies last week to shout “In November, we’ll remember,” it is not clear who actually will remember or what lessons they will take away from the Hill-Thomas hearings. Women have never viewed social issues as a monolith, and they haven’t voted as one either.
