COLUMN ONE : Women’s Old Angers Resurface : Many of them side with Clarence Thomas’ accuser, not because they know who is telling the truth but because they recall sexual harassment by other men.

Flashbacks.

A boss leans over close, suggests a change in his receptionist’s hairstyle, and his fingers rearrange a few curls to his liking, then retreat with a stroke of the cheek that provokes an involuntary shudder.

A construction worker heads for the portable toilet and stops cold as she sees on the door fresh graffiti of naked women doing sexual favors for men. Behind her, a peal of gruff laughter rises.

A new secretary walks dutifully into an executive’s office with a cup of coffee. He drawls, Honey, put some sugar in my cup. Now . . . stirrrrr.

Women who lived through those moments and much worse know each made an indelible mark, a personal trespass never to be erased. But to many men who never had a boss give nicknames to their sexual organs or slip a hand down their shirts, listening to such stories must feel like flunking a test for color blindness. How come where men see black and white, women see red?

Today, in the wake of Anita Faye Hill’s public allegations that Judge Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, had talked of pornography to her while she worked for him, women are venting anger over sexual harassment that many have held inside for years, even decades.

Many working women, given the choice of siding with Hill or The Hill, choose the black law professor from Oklahoma. Not because they know she is telling the truth--Thomas denies any such trespass--but because they know what happened to them .

There were those who expected a flood of women coming forth. That has not happened, especially not after they saw what happened to a law school professor.

But, they remember.

In a phenomenon novelist Lillian Hellman once likened to pentimento, Anita Hill scratched the surface and the old scenes snap into focus like slides on a home movie screen that would not stay boxed away.

She was 25, just like Anita, remembered Michelle Keys, 39, a job skills consultant in Cleveland.

I was so vulnerable, looking back on it, only a couple years out of college. I was working in a corporate personnel office, carrying my first briefcase around. I was on my way up!

I was supposed to work with this senior professional on a project, and I walked into his office. He was, standing on the other side of the desk, a handsome guy about 10 years older than me, with his hair neatly parted and his wife’s photo on his desk in a frame.

“I went to the zoo yesterday and watched a monkey masturbate,” he said right off. “So, what do you think?”

I was so shocked. I felt like a little girl standing there in my heels. Just scared. First thing I remember thinking was whether this guy was slated to head up this department. He was white and I was black and he was more senior than me.

Keep a blank look on your face, girl, I told myself, until you can figure out what to say.

But I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I turned around and walked out the door. Hold your shoulders back, I told myself. Walk past the secretaries and don’t let them see he got to me.

That night I thought about my Dad and how he taught me to box because I was a girl. He taught me how to “immobilize” any guy who put a hand on me. Kick him in the groin, he’d say.

But this guy hadn’t touched me, right?

I got mad anyway. Mostly, I was afraid he was going to keep on doing it.

Next day I walked into his office wearing what you would call a “power suit” and closed the door.

“I don’t want you to ever say anything like that to me again,” I said. He stumbled all over himself trying to make like it was nothing at all.

That was in 1976. I had never heard the term “sexual harassment” then.

Now I volunteer part time on the hot line for women harassed on the job. I had a forklift operator call today. She’s at home on stress leave because a guy is exposing himself to her at work. Companies don’t have any idea how much money they’re losing in absenteeism over this. But she didn’t tell the company why she was stressed out. The reason she didn’t was, the guy was her boss.

I advised her to report him to the police, to put it in writing. The usual stuff. But she doesn’t have any witnesses and she’s scared of losing her job. It wasn’t until after I hung up that I said out loud what I really wanted to tell her.

“Kick him in the groin, lady.”

The hot line Keys works at is in Cleveland, run by a nonprofit working women’s organization called 9to5. Normally, the hot line gets 50 calls a day, spokeswoman Barbara Otto says. This week, hundreds are coming in daily.

As she spoke, Otto’s voice rose and turned angry, citing a stream of comments coming out of Washington that started with President Bush responding, “not in the least,” when asked if Anita Hill’s allegations worried him.

“Sexual harassment is about power and not about sex,” Otto said. “It seems the men in the Senate can only understand war games, not sex games anyway, so here’s something for them: Sexual harassment is like Haiti. Sexual harassment is like a military coup. It is about somebody taking power over somebody else even after that person says no.”

Today, Fran Zone is 40 and owns her own public relations firm. In 1984, she got her first corporate job as an account supervisor at a big advertising agency office in Los Angeles.

At first I was flattered. I mean, this man was so attractive and powerful, a leader in the company. He professed to love me, and it was exciting. I eventually succumbed and had an affair with him for a couple weeks.

Then it got uncomfortable. I made a lot of noises about how I couldn’t handle mixing business with pleasure.

But he became obsessive. He scheduled business meetings late every night. I took to having friends meet me at the office so I would have an excuse to leave. He began stalking me, showing up at a bar where I used to go for a drink after work.

Wherever I went, there was a shadow. I was very confused. The company was all-male run. He was powerful. Then I found it wasn’t just me. He was out of control, flirting with other women too.

When the big boss came in from New York, I finally told him what was going on. He told me to dress more conservatively. As for the guy, he said: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

He called him in and made him a vice president.

I began getting physically ill. I had nightmares. I started getting claustrophobia. He was like the second skin I couldn’t peel off. I was in a rage every day.

I asked about taking legal action but was advised it would make me unemployable afterward. I started putting out feelers for a new job, but they’re not easy to find.

My escape was when I got a job managing public relations for the Playboy Jazz Festival. I know that sounds ironic, because of the image and all. But one of the best bosses I ever had was a woman at Playboy.

Patricia Swanson is 53, with six children and fifteen grandchildren.

Let’s say I’m not some young, blonde sex kitten.

In 1983, my husband decided to get out on his own, start a business, and I got a job as an assistant finance manager for Elmhurst Chrysler Plymouth in a little town called Ingleside, Ill. For more than a year, I was sexually harassed by my boss.

At least two or three times a week, he would sneak up behind me and try to unhook my bra. Sometimes I had to scoot down in my chair. On several occasions, he would run up behind me in the hallway and put his hand under my skirt and grab me between the legs. One time, I was carrying hot coffee and spilled it all over me. When I went in the restroom to clean it off, he followed. After that, I had another girl bring me coffee to avoid him.

One time he threw paper clips down my blouse. Another time he told me the sofa in his office was a hide-a-bed and he wanted to try it out. One day he started talking about his vasectomy and how his doctor told him he had to have sex 10 times to be safe. “I have two to go,” he said, turning to me. “Would you like to help clean out my tubes?”

Later, people tried to tell me I should have had more self-respect and quit. I tried to get a new job. But where do you get one in a little town like ours when you have six children to support? I was too embarrassed to tell my husband; I knew he’d want me to quit, and I couldn’t.

Finally, in December, 1984, he fired me. I sued him for firing me as a result of sex harassment, because I had rejected his advances. In court, they tried to say I was middle-aged, overweight, and had “visions of grandeur.” I felt like walking out.

In the end, the judge didn’t doubt I was sexually harassed--he didn’t really even deny most of the things he’d done. But he believed my boss when he said he didn’t fire me because of sex. He had fired me for other reasons. Like absenteeism.

I got $1 in damages, but on appeal I lost that too. Federal law doesn’t provide for damages for mere sexual harassment. In the end, I wound up having to pay his legal fees.

Every month, I send him a check for $50.

I testified in Congress last year when they were trying to push a civil rights bill that would have provided for monetary damages for sex harassment. When I started talking, most of the senators who had listened to a Cabinet member opposing it left to go vote on some other bill. I talked to those who supported it.

I just want to send Anita Hill a message. Just wish you luck and say my prayers are with you. Thank you.

Except as secretaries and seamstresses and the like, women were not welcomed into the work force before the 1950s. Judith Vladeck, 68, of New York was one of that World War II crop.

Men were away at war. I was recruited as an aeronautical engineering assistant and worked for a major aircraft company.

After the war, the federal government put out propaganda (such as newsreels for movie theaters) saying women should go back home and be homemakers to make room again for the returning veterans.

All of a sudden, it became men’s work again, and I went to law school.

I was 24 years old when I got my first job as a lawyer. “I’ll take a chance on you,” the senior partner told me. “I like your ankles.”

Women such as myself were so grateful to have any job that we didn’t look closely at the price we had to pay. The workplace was all male except for lowest positions and a few upper-level interlopers.

Then baby boomers began to go through MBA programs and gain grudging acceptance into medical schools. As they came out into the real world, they were young, and some of them experienced a very heady period. Some thought the world was their oyster.

As long as they were still junior--and still adorable--they could be everyone’s ingenue. But after that ended, they realized they weren’t getting tenure, they weren’t getting promoted--and the men who came in at the same time they did just shot right past them.

It was probably in the early ‘70s that women began to look around them and say: Hey. Something’s wrong. Women began to talk about feminism. The old gentlemanly “courtesies” were fading, and men began to come up with their own definitions of what a “liberated” woman was supposed to mean.

Now I’m an employment lawyer, and I’ve seen thousands of those same women go through sexual harassment.

One of the saddest things is how they try to make light of it at first, try polite rejection. One woman even had flowers sent to herself at work to give a co-worker at work the impression someone else was pursuing her. Most women engage in exchanges that offend them because it’s the only way they won’t wind up ostracized and alone.

Job performance goes down. Many women become ill and can’t sleep. Some simply resign. Many psychiatrists around the country have practices made up of women who feel powerless and inadequate because they could not deal with these issues.

Grace used to be one of those ingenues. Tall and strikingly attractive, she is nearly 40, has a six-digit salary and works in one of the most powerful corporations in New York. She does not even want to say the type of work she is in, because the man who was her boss back then is still in a position to snap her career in two.

Ten years have passed, and still I have saved the notes he wrote me. The first one came after his birthday party. Everyone had celebrated with cake and a drink. He was an older man with a family, and I gave him an old-fashioned peck on the cheek.

That’s the kind of person I am. Or rather, was .

“I would like a second take on my birthday kiss,” the first note said. “The first take was too quick.”

The notes continued. It was the ellipses at the end that said everything.

I started bracing myself in dread. I wondered why it was only women who had to worry about going out to a business lunch for fear it would turn into a nightmare. He asked questions like: “What do you think of extramarital affairs?”

I tried to ignore it. My strategy was to wait it out. Finally, one day, the notes stopped. I assumed he moved on to other prey. But I saved the notes. I guess I’ve always been worried that this would come up again.

But I put up a good wall for the sake of my career. That’s why I understand Anita Hill. Why should Anita Hill pay a price just because some guy gets his yahyahs off? I’m not aghast that she kept in touch with him. I would too. I admire the way she defused the situation and then moved on. That’s how we have to deal with men like that if we’re going to continue to work with them.

Gladys, 51, is a Cuban-born woman who lives in Miami. A divorced woman with four kids, she worked for years in a warehouse and would seem to have few of the advantages Anita Hill had before she went public with her claims about Thomas.

Still, when Gladys watched Anita Hill on TV, she felt sorry for her.

At least I was blessed with witnesses.

I worked for six years in a warehouse for Eastern Airlines. The bad things didn’t happen until the last year. I was just a floor sweeper in the warehouse, the only woman with 120 men.

Sometimes they would stick obscene things on the back of my shirt, and I would be walking around with them not even knowing it.

Maybe being Cuban had something to do with it. They sometimes complained about my accent and told me I should speak English better. American girls in the company would go across the street to have a glass of wine with them. But I never did. I wasn’t raised that way.

There were all sorts of things. There was a dead snake. Then, 10 or 12 of them would get together and pull their pants down. Everybody saw what they were doing to me. I would start crying, and then they made it a point to make sure they made me cry at least once every day. I was like their pet to tease.

I talked to the supervisor and he said it was just “childish.”

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

As I said, I was lucky. When I finally complained, 25 men came forward and signed affidavits.

Please don’t make me think about this anymore now. The day I settled my lawsuit with the company, I erased everything from my mind. I don’t want to remember names or dates.

Please, don’t use my name. My children are older now. I don’t want my children to find out what happened.

The “horseplay,” as Eastern attorneys later called it in court, lasted more than a year. Gladys went to 19 lawyers before she found someone to take her case, attorney Elizabeth DuFresne said. “Then she prayed, pointed her finger and found me in the Yellow Pages.” She settled the case in 1987.

Even at this writing, women reporters are gathering around, sharing stories. These women call people every day and ask them to go on the record. But when it comes to their own, they stop, find reasons not to step forward.

It was so long ago, some begin; I don’t want to open myself up for more cracks now. Or, the man was famous--you may see his name in the paper tomorrow--and no one will believe me. Or, his wife and kids still don’t know what a jerk the guy is; I don’t want to hurt them .

One editor was physically harassed by a boss years ago on a small newspaper in a way that so humiliated her that she said it was years before she “confessed.” “Confessed?” a co-worker asked incredulously. She chose to remain silent, afraid of jeopardizing the “objectivity” that has earned her standing among a set of nearly all-male peers.

A surprising number of women are still in touch with their victimizers, at least indirectly. Some still exchange courtesies with them in precisely the same way Anita Hill reportedly called Clarence Thomas after she left his employ. As they have risen in their careers, the irony is that some find themselves closer to, not farther away from, the men who harassed them.

They maintain their silence.

A Los Angeles political activist shudders every time she sees the name of one of her previous employers, an Eastern congressman, on the masthead of the latest cause. But her organization needs him.

There are so many reasons not to talk:

The man was my father’s best friend, and my own father didn’t believe I didn’t provoke him.

I don’t want to destroy the man’s career just because his hand slipped a few times; look what’s happened to Clarence Thomas.

Don’t you understand? I don’t want my kids to think of me this way.

I don’t want to think of myself that way.

Besides, women said, it wasn’t just the men who harassed them they had to consider. There were others. There was that friend of her father who helped her get the job, that client she needs to please to keep his account with the firm, that buyer at the department store chain whose order she needs to keep commissions coming in next season. That fair-haired boy who is merely a co-worker today but slated for the fast track to the top tomorrow.

One former labor lawyer made a pact with herself when she became president of her own family’s company of 200 employees. Never would she let sex harassment happen in her plant. When one of her clerical staff called and said she was being harassed, she put on her “game face”--her father’s face, her man’s face.

She called the man in and slammed her hand down on the desk.

“If you ever do that again, you’re out of here!”

Geraldine Baum in New York, Marlene Cimons in Washington, D.C., Ann Rovin in Denver and Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.