The <i> Click!</i> Heard ‘Round the Nation : Politics: The Thomas hearings left longtime feminists more resolved to change public policy and seem to have inspired a new generation.

Click!

That buzzword of the modern feminist movement, introduced in 1972 by writer Jane O’Reilly in the premiere issue of Ms. magazine, described moments when individual women became radicalized: The housewife who realized she was defined only in terms of her husband. Click! The professional whose husband still expected her to do all the housework. Click!

This week, to hear many women tell it, a collective click! rumbled across the country unlike any consciousness-raising moment of the last 20 years.

This click! was not about Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas, or who was telling the truth, say the activists--it was about women’s feelings of powerlessness and the fundamental differences in the ways men and women experience the world.

And these politically active women, in the aftermath of the Thomas confirmation process, are grappling with the question of whether the energy and anger that appears to have been unleashed by the events of recent weeks can be harnessed to push legislation important to them, to promote more women to elected office--and to punish the male politicians they feel betrayed or belittled them.

“Either the genie is out of the bottle, or everyone will go back home and forget about this,” says Harriet Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, whose goal is to get more women elected to local, state and national office. “Our job now is to make sure they don’t forget.”

Woods and others believe they are dealing with “an entirely new phenomenon,” that these events have touched a chord within women who were never before part of the modern women’s movement--a groundswell reaction that caused members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to reverse themselves and decide to hold hearings on Anita Hill’s charges after all.

One result of Hill’s allegations has been “to break the silence held by many, many women who have suffered sexual harassment,” says feminist attorney Gloria Allred. Since the airing of the charges, says Allred, her Los Angeles firm of 18 attorneys has logged about 300 calls a day from women seeking advice about pursuing harassment complaints against men they work or have worked with. The firm usually receives about 400 such calls per month, she says.

While the increase in calls to Allred’s office may stem in part from the national media exposure she has had since the start of the confirmation hearings, other organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the California Women’s Law Center also have reported a rise in calls from women with possible harassment cases. “Never before,” says Allred, “has the feminist adage been more true: The personal is political and the political is personal.”

“Part of what heightened this drama was that it also suggested the potential of women’s power,” says Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics, a Rutgers University think tank. “When they got angry, it did make a difference--those hearings happened. Those senators had an image of women as voters all over the country. There was a concern about how women felt about this.”

To be sure, many of the national polls conducted in the days before Thomas was confirmed indicated overwhelming support among both men and women for the nominee, and for his side of the story, despite the sexual harassment allegations leveled against him by Hill. But Woods, who in 1982 ran unsuccessfully against Thomas’ staunchest Senate supporter, John Danforth (R-Mo.), says of the statistics:

“Even if the polls say 60% of the women don’t care--what about the other 40%? That’s still quite a bit. Not all women are going to be activists; a representative sample always does the work. Even if we can just double our numbers, we’re going to be huge.

“We already had been in the process of developing programs to reach women who wouldn’t come to the activist organizations, the range of women in the workplace from corporations to labor unions,” Woods adds. “I believe (the hearings have) shortcutted what would otherwise have been an arduous process.”

Women activists emphasized that the anger touched off this past week had less to do with Thomas or Hill than it did with a process that initially left women out and never took them seriously.

“Men do not understand what it’s like to be in an organization and not be in a position of power,” says Phyllis Palmer, a professor of American studies and women’s studies at George Washington University.

There is no doubt, many activists say, that having more women in the Senate could have produced a different outcome and almost certainly would have resulted in a different process.

“It was like that scene in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ where they pull away the curtain--and we really saw the Senate,” says Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.). “We think that women are doing everything men are doing. But what you saw in the Senate is exactly like every corporate boardroom in America. They all look like the Senate. And you realize how far we have not come.”

“We’ve struck something very deep that was contained below the surface for a very long time,” says Mandel of Rutgers. “These feelings could not have been created only over the course of a week. They were always there. Now that they have been struck, I don’t think they’ll quickly go away.

“Every election season I’ve said women have made progress, incremental progress, but at the same time, I’ve always said we don’t have any real power,” Mandel adds. “And I think this was a weeklong drama of women’s powerlessness.”

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for a Feminist Majority, believes that a subtle but important change has taken place, even among longtime women’s rights supporters--a change she hopes can translate into representative gains for women within the political system.

“Over the years, many women have been quick to say: ‘Women should have equal opportunities.’ But they were never willing to say a woman should be appointed or elected on the basis of gender--and this has changed all that,” Smeal says.

“This all-male Senate Judiciary Committee just didn’t get it,” she says. “They might agree with me on abortion and on other things, but they still didn’t get it. It’s a stag atmosphere. They laugh at sexist jokes. When we have a wife-beating bill on the floor, they snicker. It’s a club. Men and women should be equal in rights--but they just don’t have equal life experiences. That’s why we need equal representation.”

To that end, women say they will push again to get more women to run for office--and expect to target many of the men who supported Thomas, or who “victimized the victim,” Anita Hill.

“I supported (Sen. Dennis) DeConcini (D-Ariz.) and had a fund-raiser for him prior to his first race,” says Lynne Wasserman, a Los Angeles attorney and major Democratic Party donor. “Now, I would love to have Hattie Babbitt (a Phoenix lawyer and wife of former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt) in there running as a Democrat against DeConcini in the primary whenever he’s up for reelection. I would get on a plane today and ask her to run.”

And Sen. Charles Robb (D-Va.), who voted for Thomas, was picketed Wednesday night by the fund at the annual fall dinner of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, of which he is chairman.

Margery Tabankin, executive director of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, a political action committee that expects to donate $1 million to progressive candidates during the next two years, says she has fielded numerous calls from women this week saying “they no longer want to support the best person --that we should be just getting into having only women run. These women supported men they believed in. Now they feel we don’t have that luxury anymore.”

Tabankin says her organization will be preparing a “target list” this weekend, looking race by race at the likely candidates in 1992.

“We have nine points we look at to make our financial commitments,” she says. “I think the events of the past week will undoubtedly be added into the equation. I would be really surprised if people who voted for Clarence Thomas get support from us. I’ve had a lot of people coming to me saying they don’t want money going to people who voted for this man.”

Woods agrees, but emphasizes: “We are not about opposing men--we are about electing women.”

The caucus, she says, will recruit women to run “where we see this as a good issue, and this could be in places like Illinois, perhaps Pennsylvania. We think (Sen. Arlen) Specter (the Pennsylvania Republican who was one of Anita Hill’s most vocal critics on the Judiciary Committee) will pay a price, and ought to. But that is not our job. We really think the whole country paid a price because women were left out of the process.”

They acknowledge there is really no way to know yet whether this will really pay off in 1992--only that the stirring out there is real. Early tests may come with legislation important to activist women--the family- and medical-leave bill, for example, and the civil rights measure, which contains a key provision on sexual harassment.

“If I were working in the White House this week, I would pause a minute to decide whether another veto of the family-leave act carried no political cost,” says Susan Estrich, a USC professor of law and a director of Michael Dukakis’ unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign.

Schroeder is less optimistic. “Do I think they’ll pass legislation because they feel guilty?” she says. “I still don’t think they understand. And I don’t think they feel guilty at all.”

But Smeal disagrees. “Anita Hill has put a human face on this,” she says. “We will look more reasonable, and our claims more just.”