PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : Look Who’s Inspiring Trust Now : Being a woman is becoming an asset on the ballot in the year of the outsider.

Political aftershocks from the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings in October are still knocking down assumptions around the country. Outsider candidates, several of them women, have managed to override voter disgust and score upset victories in the primaries. Pols and pundits seem stunned because, well, they still don’t “get it.” The televised Senate Judiciary Committee tableau starkly revealed who holds power (an alliance of misogynist and inept men) and who doesn’t (women). Tens of millions of women--and men--felt in a flash, felt with an instinct sharpened by decades of insult, that the dignity of Anita Hill required political action.

Harris Wofford’s surprise victory in the Pennsylvania Senate race was the first to reveal that so-called women’s issues, like health care, could galvanize a sufficient number of disgruntled voters and lead them to provide the margin of victory for underdog candidates. Then Carol Moseley Braun, who decided to enter Illinois’ U.S. Senate race after watching the largely hostile interrogation of Anita Hill, astonished know-it-alls when she won the Democratic nomination against the incumbent (and Thomas supporter) Alan Dixon. Now Lynn Yeakel, a fund-raiser for women’s charities who was virtually unknown three months ago, has won the Democratic nomination for senator from Pennsylvania with a television campaign featuring Sen. Arlen Specter’s grueling inquisition of Hill.

It’s been quite a year for stoking women’s anger. Anita Hill’s charges, the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson date-rape trials, Susan Faludi’s best-selling expose of the backlash against feminism, and the erosion of abortion rights by the Supreme Court have revived feminist consciousness. New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen has chastised Bill Clinton for romancing every constituency but women, surrounding himself with an all-male circle of advisers, and assuming that he can take the gender gap for granted.

In this, the year of the outsider, being a woman is becoming a political asset. Female candidates, who had so much trouble bankrolling their campaigns, are finding that pent-up women’s anger is convertible to dollars. Emily’s List (Early Money Is Like Yeast), started seven years ago to provide pro-choice Democratic women with front-end financial support, reports an unprecedented outpouring of contributions. Not to be outdone, pro-choice Republican women created WISH List (Women in the Senate and House).

It now seems likely that abortion will join the economy as a key issue in the fall campaign. Last month’s giant pro-choice demonstration in Washington and the successful fight to stave off Operation Rescue’s campaign against abortion in Buffalo, N.Y., revealed how unwilling women are to abandon their reproductive choices. The vast majority of Americans, including many Republicans, still supports abortion rights. A private GOP poll of Republican primary voters in conservative Orange County found that 78% favored abortion rights. Pro-choice Republican women plan to wage a fight against the right-to-life platform at the GOP convention.

At a time when voters of both sexes are disgusted with politics as usual, women candidates appear to inspire trust. Tracking polls find that male voters believe that women are less corrupt than male politicians. Political analyst Ethel Klein says: “Most people think women are more honest, hard-working and trustworthy and that they represent their constituents better.”

Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) and Dianne Feinstein, running for the two U.S. Senate seats in California, stand to benefit from voter enthusiasm for new faces. Emily’s List, which helped put Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in the Senate and Ann Richards in the Texas governor’s office, included Boxer and Feinstein in its first round of recommendations for 1992. Boxer, running on a solid record of legislative initiatives for health care, family leave, abortion rights, environmental protection and reduction of the military budget has promised to become “Jesse Helms’ worst nightmare.” Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, failed to gain the support of women’s groups in the 1990 gubernatorial race and was defeated. Now she is a late-blooming feminist who might ride the rising tide.

Despite many defeats and hundreds of obituaries, 25 years of feminism opened the way for the current surge of women into national politics. But it took Anita Hill to jolt the national psyche. Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to sit in the back of the bus, but her audacity ignited the Montgomery boycott, which after many wearying months prevailed. Anita Hill failed to bring Clarence Thomas down. But she inspired a breadth and depth of resolve that is going to push insiders out and bring outsiders in for years to come.