Back to Life

Looking back, it’s hard to believe it took just nine hours for Anita Faye Hill to ignite a national debate about men and women in the workplace. In only nine hours--an ordinary workday for most people, with commuting time thrown in--Hill succeeded in firmly planting the phrase “sexual harassment” onto the social landscape. While she was at it, she also managed to turn her own life upside down.

“People think of the hearing as this very long event,” Hill said of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1991 confirmation proceedings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. “It happened over a weekend.”

Filled with drama, that weekend was also long on the surreal. A panel of United States senators actually assessing whether a potential Justice of the Supreme Court had placed a pubic hair on a soft-drink can. One senator, Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, kept a straight face as he read aloud from “The Exorcist.”

For Hill, the weekend proved both a curse and a blessing--an embarrassment, and an opportunity to embrace what has become a life’s cause. Overnight, she became a much-admired poster girl for sexual harassment. As she writes in her new book, “Speaking Truth to Power” (Doubleday), she also became an object of vilification and occasionally, death threats. Her private life, she reports, all but evaporated. Five years after the hearings, she said, “I was at a mall in South Africa, and someone came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Anita Hill?’ ”

The same sort of nonstop attention was in force last week as Hill discussed her new book. Zealous about what remains of her private life, she consented to a handful of television appearances, and fewer print interviews. She refused to meet reporters in her hometown of Norman, Okla., opting instead for lunch at a midtown Manhattan restaurant normally frequented by celebrities with profiles far higher than her own. True to her account in her book, she was instantly recognized. Though the reservation was not in Hill’s name, there was the maitre d’, wishing her well. A table filled with well-dressed ladies-who-lunch surrounded her with hugs.

This was surprising, for in person, Hill bears only passing resemblance to her rather stern image from newspapers and television. At 41, she is slender to the point of willowy. Her features are elegant, and while she is intense while discussing her political baptism-by-fire, she can also muster a warm smile and hearty laugh--qualities that had little occasion to surface in the nine hours that changed Hill’s world.

So, she was asked, does she sometimes feel like the Joan of Arc of sexual harassment? Sure, Hill replied, and here came the mirth the Senate never saw: “I refuse to die, though.”

Ever since she bounced onto the national celebrity-scope, Hill has seemed like a woman of contradictions. She wanted the obscurity of teaching commercial law in Oklahoma, yet she accepted the attention that followed her Capitol Hill testimony. Her anonymity disappeared the day she took the stand against Clarence Thomas, yet in a minute, she said, she’d do it again.

“When I made my decision to give the Senate my testimony, it was a decision made on principle, not expecting any outcome in any direction,” she said. “So the decision to do it again would have to be the same, because the same principles apply.”

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Hill was just 27 years old when she left Washington the first time, a Yale Law School graduate who admits to being jaded after a year as Thomas’ assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and an undistinguished year at a law firm before that. “Speaking Truth to Power” is straightforward, earnest and lawyerly, and in the book Hill writes that she was thrilled to return to Oklahoma, even if it did mean teaching at Oral Roberts University. By the time she went public with her accusations against her former boss--charging Thomas with pressuring her to go out with him, and with showering her with graphic descriptions of his private life--she was a well-regarded member of the law school faculty at the University of Oklahoma, her undergraduate alma mater.

To this day, Hill insists she does not know exactly how her name made its way to the committee reviewing Thomas’ nomination to the court. “The whole idea that I planned and contrived this is so absolutely ludicrous,” she said. The experience was grueling and demeaning: “a witch hunt--and I was the witch.”

Hill writes that her family--she is one of 13 children--provided crucial support as she repeatedly fielded questions about why she waited almost 10 years to make her accusations against Thomas. Inevitably, with the publication of her book, the same questions and contradictions arise. Why wait so long to tell her tale? If she is sick and tired of being defined as having lent her name to the “Hill-Thomas hearings,” why tell it at all? If she so treasures her privacy, why not chalk it all up as a difficult, life-changing experience--and then get on with things?

Hill has an explanation. She kept her own counsel as Thomas took his seat on the Supreme Court, and as a series of books tumbled out about the hearings. She saw herself portrayed variously as a harridan and a hussy. Often she was painted as the ultimate scorned woman. She has spoken widely about sexual harassment, and in 1995, contributed an essay to an Oxford University Press anthology about “Race, Gender and Power in America.” But she saved the full story about what happened before, after and during those nine hours in Washington for her memoir.

“In some ways I wrote this book because there had been this one dimensional, monolithic view of me and of what took place,” she said. Besides, she needed time--years, as it happened, to process the repercussions of what happened in Washington. “My life was in complete turmoil, and I had little time to think about what it all meant,” she said, adding, “I think the country needed time to reflect on the question of sexual harassment and see where it was going--whether it was indeed a significant matter or just something that was ‘of the moment.’ ”

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A nagging lawsuit involving parties named Paula Jones and William Jefferson Clinton makes it clear that the issue has not gone away. Top-ranking members of the U.S. military would no doubt also agree that sexual harassment is hardly the Hula-Hoop of contemporary social issues. Although not always enthusiastically, corporate America is also learning to take the term seriously, immersing top executives of both sexes in seminar after seminar on gender sensitivity.

Clearly Anita Hill did not invent the concept, “but from the standpoint of taking it from a very misunderstood issue to one that is at least getting some discussion around the table, I think the hearings, and her involvement, were important,” said Linda M. Poverny, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California who also acts as a consultant to businesses. “From the standpoint of the people who are in positions to make decisions, to exercise some authority, it has definitely made a difference.”

But philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute, is less generous in her assessment of Hill’s role in the debate. “It was the worst of all possible cases on which to base a national harassment policy,” Sommers said. “Even if [Thomas] did what she said he did, it might have been, at the worst, a case of very bad manners--and she might have told him so. But because of the Anita Hill case, we have reached the point where if a man is alone in a room with a woman, she can destroy his career.”

Not that speaking out did much to advance Hill’s own professional standing. She was more conspicuous than some officials at a conservative state university would have liked. One state representative branded her “a cancerous growth” on the university. In the fall of 1995, only about 20 students signed up for her course; not long afterward she took a leave of absence to work on the book. Last fall she resigned.

“I think she has a very positive persona throughout the nation,” an Oklahoma University colleague, Dr. Dianne Bystrom, said. “Sometimes I think that wasn’t enjoyed as much in Norman as it was in the other parts of the United States.”

Sociology professor Susan Silbey of Wellesley College, an expert on sexual harassment, agreed. Hill was “a lightning rod” who helped raise awareness about sexual harassment, said Silbey. Her testimony “legitimated the public and government attention to something that had always been marginalized,” the professor went on. Since most social problems first come to light as a single story told by one individual, “the problem is easily dismissed as a behavioral aberration of that victim, who perhaps deserved it, or perhaps it is explained because the perpetrator is seen as extremely abnormal. . . . I suspect that the wives of those senators--and their daughters--all told those men over dinner that she was telling the truth. Of course, it didn’t do her much good.”

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So even though Hill helped pull the genie out of the bottle, the question remains: Why would any sane woman go through this? “Well, then,” Hill rejoined, once again displaying the smile that eluded official Washington, “there was the allegation that I wasn’t sane.”

In truth, she said, more serious this time, “I don’t know why anyone would do it, even when you kind of know what the consequences are going to be.” But in 1991, she said, “I felt I had a responsibility to the process. I think now that the process failed us all. It failed the public, and it failed the court.”

As she did in 1991, Hill maintains in person and in her book that “Clarence Thomas, the individual” was never the target of her testimony. But Senate panelists, Hill said, saw her only as a woman bent on destroying their nominee. “They didn’t want someone who didn’t have any political clout, who had no political resume, interfering with their hearing,” she said. “The whole thing was tempered with the image of me being insignificant.”

Hill writes of her determination to maintain her composure during rigorous questioning by the likes of Sen. Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor. At one point during the Pennsylvania Republican’s interrogation, Hill willed herself not to sweat. “Many on that panel,” she said, “seemed to forget that I was a private citizen who had been invited to speak.”

Whenever she speaks about her experience, Hill said she is asked if she thinks the Senate would have treated a white woman differently. She believes so. “I think the questioning would have been less aggressive. Some of these very conservative people would have backed off if they thought [Thomas] was harassing a white woman. As a black woman, there wasn’t any way to identify with me, maybe even to see me as someone who had a right to resist if what I was saying happened did happen. I think the race question, combined with the gender question, gave the Senate permission to behave as badly as they did.”

She paused, the way a teacher sometimes hesitates before making an important point. “But it was their egregious behavior that made people realize how bad the problem is. They have themselves to blame for creating this symbol.”

But the symbol has a life, she said quite firmly, albeit an existence rearranged by nine strange hours on Capitol Hill. She has no firm plans for her next professional step, though she is weighing several academic positions, including one at UC Berkeley. She also has no boyfriend; “being involved in an intimate relationship with someone is probably much too complicated right now,” she has concluded. Worst of all is the absence of her treasured anonymity. “I want to have some of my privacy back,” she said.

Still, Hill said, “there are some parts of my life right now that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Right now, my commitment to gender bias and sexual harassment is the main thing in my life.” When she began speaking out about sexual harassment, “I said, all right, I’ll give this two years,” she remembered. “Five years after that I’m still there. I’d like this problem to go away, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I guess I’ll continue talking about it as long as it’s out there, and as long as I can be effective.”