Beyond the political realm, countless numbers of women who had been harassed sexually at work felt newly empowered to act on their experience. In the year that followed Hill’s testimony, harassment complaints filed with the EEOC rose by more than 50 percent over the previous year.39 The Tailhook scandal—in which eighty-three women and seven men alleged that they were sexually assaulted and/or harassed by US Navy and Marine officers at the annual Tailhook Association Symposium in Las Vegas in the same fall of 1991—incited further outrage about men’s apparent sense of sexual entitlement. Women were tired of simply swallowing gross forms of harassment as if it were their due, and many determined they weren’t going to take it anymore.
The events of 1991 prompted a new focus on the problem of sexual harassment and a new determination to end it. The landscape of sexual harassment—including both the attitudes that had fostered and tolerated it and the regulations building to dismantle it—began rapidly changing across the nation. But this focus and determination were largely the province of feminists and liberals. As the conservatives who rallied around Thomas and against Hill suggested, sexual harassment would be an intensely contested issue. Indeed, at the 1992 Republican convention, delegates stalked Nina Totenberg—whom they blamed for breaking the Hill story during Thomas’s hearings—and to her face repeatedly called her a “whore,” a sexually harassing word if there ever was one.40
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL harassment as it burst into national consciousness in the wake of the Thomas-Hill hearings requires understanding the longer, entwined history of working women and forced sexual intimacy by those wielding economic power over them. Sexual coercion of women by masters and overseers was endemic to the American slave system. But “free” women also experienced sexual pressure, and sometimes outright assault, in the households, manufacturing plants, and clerical offices where they worked. In 1887, Helen Campbell’s book about women wage-workers, Prisoners of Poverty, pointedly noted that “household service has become synonymous with the worst degradation that comes to woman.… Domestic service is the cover for more licentiousness than can be found in any other trade in which women are at work.”41 And in his 1905 muckraking novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair wrote of women’s harsh work lives in the meat-packing industry:
Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. Things that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted by everybody; only they did not show, as in the old slavery times, because there was no difference in color between the master and slave.42
Even bracketing cases of physical violence and rape, the situation for working women was often dire. As Gloria Steinem put it, the behaviors that would come to be called sexual harassment were for years “just called ‘life’” for working women, who were expected to deal uncomplainingly with whatever lewd teasing and advances their male supervisors cared to press upon them.43
Well into the twentieth century, the law made it very difficult for women to sustain complaints of unwanted sexual advances against employers.44 Old notions that the public sphere was for men and that women should only occupy the private, domestic sphere were shored up by a legal apparatus that restricted women’s ability to participate in the public sphere and refused to adjudicate claims of harm brought by women in the private sphere. Women who entered the public workforce basically did so at their own risk, as courts excluded them from protective labor laws while also deeming sexual coercion a private sphere matter. Reformers worked to address this issue, but it was not until the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism arose that opposition to men’s aggressive and degrading sexual behavior in the workplace coalesced into a wider cause.
Eventually, the concept of sexual harassment crystallized in the spring of 1975 on the campus of Cornell University, where the first public “speak-out” on sexual harassment took place. A group of feminist activists and lawyers had rallied around the case of Carmita Wood, a Cornell employee who had quit her job after several instances of unwanted sexual groping by a distinguished professor but who was unable to receive unemployment benefits. Nearly three hundred women showed up to talk publicly about the workplace harassment they had endured, often without telling anyone and always without knowing how to make it stop without losing their jobs. As Susan Brownmiller later wrote, “The inappropriate male behavior in the workplace revealed at the speak-out ran the gamut: crude propositions to barter sex for employment, physical overtures and masturbatory displays, verbal abuse and hostile threats that appeared patently designed to intimidate a woman and drive her out of her job.”45 When a survey of the group was taken, 70 percent of the respondents claimed to have been sexually harassed at work, and 92 percent considered sexual harassment a serious problem.
A New York Times story on the event, headlined “Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work,” was syndicated nationally and, as one organizer later said, “put sexual harassment on the map.” The Wall Street Journal followed a few months later with a front-page story on harassment, and other nationally circulated publications ran pieces over the next year.46 In 1979, feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon published the landmark book Sexual Harassment of Working Women, which forcefully argued that such harassment was a form of sex discrimination based on both the sexual and the economic inequality of women, a theory that had a major impact on legal debates about sexual harassment law. As MacKinnon put it, “Economic power is to sexual harassment as physical force is to rape.”47 By the time the Hollywood comedy Nine to Five came out in 1980—starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and an unforgettable Dolly Parton doing her best to stave off the advances of her male boss (and taking sweet revenge)—sexual harassment as a pervasive form of sex-based discrimination had seeped into the nation’s consciousness.48
It also had begun to become part of its laws. By 1977, appellate decisions in three important court cases had affirmed the right of a woman to sue corporate employers for sexual harassment under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The EEOC, led by Eleanor Holmes Norton, took an active role in investigating sexual harassment claims, and businesses began doing more to monitor the behavior of supervisors in a position to harass subordinates. Under Norton, who had been appointed to the EEOC post by President Jimmy Carter, the EEOC in 1980 issued guidelines affirming sexual harassment to be a violation of section 703 of Title VII. The 1980 guidelines defined harassment on the basis of sex in the workplace as unwelcome sexual behavior that created a hostile working environment or otherwise clearly affected the recipient’s ability to perform on the job.49
The administration of President Ronald Reagan, who took office shortly after the 1980 guidelines on sexual harassment were adopted, initially opposed this approach to sexual harassment, if not the concept itself, and sought to loosen the regulations. In the spring of 1981, the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, a Reagan ally, testified before a Senate committee reviewing new federal guidelines and suggested that men only harassed women who were asking for it: “Sexual harassment is not a problem for virtuous women, except in the rarest of case,” she stated. “Men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is no. Virtuous women are seldom accosted.” According to Schlafly, “some women have abandoned the commandments against adultery and fornication”: if harassed, that is, they got what they richly deserved.50 Clarence Thomas, while serving on Reagan’s transition team to advise him on civil rights, joined in a report arguing that in seeking to eliminate “personal slights and sexual advances which contribute to an ‘intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment,’” the guidelines aimed at “a goal impossible to reach” and were certain to lead to “a barrage of trivial complaints against empl
oyers around the nation.” The report urged, “Expenditure of the EEOC’s limited resources in pursuit of this goal is unwise.”51
Six years later, the US Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiff’s favor in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, a sexual harassment case brought by Mechelle Vinson and the first ever such case heard by the nation’s highest court. By then, Thomas’s office had shifted course, and Thomas had pressed the US solicitor general to defend the EEOC guidelines in a friend-of-the-court brief, landing Thomas on the winning side of the court’s ruling. The court’s opinion, written and delivered by Justice William H. Rehnquist, cited the EEOC guidelines and agreed with the commission that sexual harassment is a violation of women’s rights: “Without question, when a supervisor sexually harasses a subordinate because of the subordinate’s sex, that supervisor ‘discriminate[s]’ on the basis of sex,” thereby violating Title VII; moreover, and against the petitioner’s argument that any damage to the plaintiff was more “psychological” in nature and therefore not subject to this law, “the EEOC Guidelines fully support the view that harassment leading to noneconomic injury can violate Title VII.” A “hostile or abusive work environment” based on sexual discrimination was enough to establish violation of the law.52 Justices ruled 9–0 in favor of Vinson, a landmark decision that permanently enshrined protections against sexual harassment in the nation’s legal code.
Five years later, the nation got its crash course in sexual harassment from the Thomas hearings. Some observers noted a grim irony: if any part of Hill’s testimony was truthful, Thomas had been harassing her in the very same period that, as chair of the EEOC after succeeding Norton, he was the top federal government official charged with enforcing the laws against sexual harassment. That he had seemed lukewarm about those laws when he entered the office was not forgotten. But despite the Reagan-era EEOC’s hesitation about sexual harassment litigation, during his 1991 confirmation hearings Thomas and his supporters wanted Americans to know that he—and they—strongly opposed sexual harassment and supported women’s rights. The fact that, in this case, they trusted Thomas over Hill could not be taken as a policy position. Indeed, one Republican ally of Thomas’s was at the very time of the hearings the chief sponsor of a civil rights bill (enacted later that year) that, among other things, extended protections against sexual harassment to new sectors of federal government employees and, more generally, expanded the options for litigating sexual harassment.53
In any event, the confirmation hearings were the jumping-off point not only for evolutions in sexual harassment law but also for renewed public interest in stories about victims. Hill’s account had struck a deep chord in working women across the country, many if not most of whom could conjure memories of harassment on the job. Popular periodicals seized the moment: People magazine ran a profile of Hill in late October and, not to take sides, two weeks later did a feature on Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, that depicted her as a similar kind of victim. The short article on Hill was followed by several more pages of narratives and photos from half a dozen other women who spoke of their own experiences of sexual harassment. People also included interview segments with Catharine MacKinnon and linguist Deborah Tannen on harassment’s definition and differing perceptions by men and women. The spread on Virginia Thomas shared the first article’s theme of defeating the silence inflicted by shame and thus rising triumphantly over those who sought to hurt you—Hill’s piece was titled “She Could Not Keep Silent,” Thomas’s “Breaking Silence”—and sought sympathy from the magazine’s mostly female readers for all that she and her husband had endured during his ordeal. Thomas also told of being the victim of sexual harassment in the workplace. In this moment, to claim harassment and present oneself as a survivor of it was a badge of pride.54
Whether true or false, Anita Hill’s testimony had an immediate impact. By many measures, women outraged by her treatment at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee provided the margin of victory in the 1992 election that swept Bill Clinton into the presidency alongside the new women legislators. In the same month as the election, claims of sexual assault and abuse were leveled by ten women against Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, a situation that led to his resignation three years later. The number of sexual harassment claims filed with the EEOC and its state counterparts more than doubled between 1991 and 1998, going from 6,883 to 15,618. Hill, who never brought formal charges against her supervisor and, by her account, never intended to go public, wound up being a national symbol of the sexual harassment cause, albeit a deeply divisive one. Ironically, if her testimony helped get Bill Clinton into the White House, it also facilitated the conditions of his 1998 impeachment.
THAT IMPEACHMENT BEGAN, IN MANY ways, with Paula Corbin Jones, who grew up in tiny Lonoke, Arkansas, as the youngest daughter of a Nazarene preacher who forbade television, makeup, short dresses, and most other “outside world” influences. Jones barely graduated from high school and dropped out of a junior college in Little Rock before working several low-paying clerical and sales jobs. In the spring of 1991, she took a position at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (a state government organization) that paid her an annual salary of $10,270. Three years later, in May 1994, Jones filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against President William Jefferson Clinton that asked for $700,000 in damages. While she was alone with him in a Little Rock hotel room, she alleged, Clinton had fondled and attempted to kiss her before dropping his pants and requesting oral sex. Her accusations against him included unwanted touching, penile exposure, and threats against her if she did not acquiesce. Clinton’s sexual escapades had made news since long before he won the presidency, but this brutish behavior was shocking stuff. Almost immediately, Jones became a household name across the nation.55
Jones’s sexual harassment allegations against Clinton captured the energetic attention of conservative pundits, politicians, and religious leaders and inexorably shifted the public discourse around harassment claims. Conservatives plainly believed that Jones’s case against Clinton was credible in a way that Hill’s allegations against Thomas were not. There may have been evidence-based reasons for this assessment, but it was hardly clear that evidence was the driving engine of this shift. The conservative change of heart concerning sexual harassment seemed to reveal more than the progression in recognizing the seriousness of that crime. When “sexual harassment” was seen as a feminist—and therefore liberal—issue, few conservatives engaged sympathetically with the idea. Few, after all, had delved deeply into questioning whether Anita Hill might be telling the truth, and what should be done if she were. It was Paula Jones’s case against Bill Clinton that opened the door for conservatives to express indignation on behalf of women against a man who would sexually harass them—especially if that harasser were a Democratic president of the United States. Clinton opponents seized on the image of the president as a sexual predator and wielded it for political advantage.
The Clinton sex scandals changed the way conservatives talked about sexual harassment and women’s equality in the workplace. They had been no fans of feminism before, but now they were expressing outrage at the sexual mistreatment of a woman by a man with power over her job. Even some conservative women, who decried the hypocrisy of feminists who were turning cartwheels in their attempts to defend Clinton, rolled their eyes at the “double standards” of “the conservatives who discovered sexual harassment when they discovered Paula Jones.” These latecomers were not very convincing in their sincerity, noted one contrarian female writer, who complained that such “posturing sends the message that harassment charges are easily used as a political weapon” while also making conservatives answerable for “the Blob-like spread of the sexual harassment concept,” which had reached some bizarre and even “Orwellian” extremes.56
Conservative Christian legal organizations came out in support of Jones and pointed out the politics on the other side, criticizing the deafening silence of many feminist groups and leaders—a stark contrast to
their earlier support of Anita Hill. In May 1994, shortly after Jones filed suit, the Christian Defense Coalition (not part of Reed’s Christian Coalition) announced the creation of the Paula Jones Legal Defense Fund. Katie Mahoney, heading the Washington, DC, press conference that announced the new organization, adopted feminist rhetoric while taking on feminists directly:
What women want is a chance to come forward and speak their piece without political bias or preconceived ideas because of someone’s ideological view or support of the accused. We want to be afforded the opportunity to expose the pressure placed upon us behind closed doors, when no one else is looking, and expect to be taken seriously, not laughed at, not prejudged according to how we appear, and certainly not dismissed as ludicrous because someone in a position of power is being protected.… Where are the so-called feminist groups now?
Mahoney went on, “I find it very interesting now that the quote ‘women’s groups’ are the ones who are hurting women, and I feel this very strongly.” Feminist groups, by not standing up to defend Jones, were exposed as hypocrites and opportunists, Mahoney argued. Rita Schulte, who followed Mahoney on the stage, went further: “I’m a director of this fund because I believe Paula Jones deserves the same respect that was afforded to Anita Hill. This is not a liberal or conservative issue but one of fairness and justice to treat all women equally.”57 This was an intriguing shift: from a Schlafly-type argument that women brought harassment on themselves, religious conservatives were now appropriating feminist arguments about women’s equality.
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