Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [76]
As Tuesday, October 8, wore on, pressure mounted for a delay of the Senate vote on the Thomas nomination. Once the Republican senators realized that a hearing on my claim was increasingly likely, the negative rhetoric escalated. The generalized comments and misrepresentations about sexual harassment turned into personal attacks on me. Like the rhetoric of the day popular in today’s political campaigns, the pro-Thomas rhetoric was based more on aspersions to me than enthusiastic arguments for the candidate.
As the Senate debated a postponement of the vote, Senator Hatch displayed his ignorance of the issue of sexual harassment as well as his hostility to my claim. “She isn’t some young, high school secretary,” he said. “She’s a Yale law graduate interested in civil rights and these issues and an expert on them.” Over the course of the two preceding days, Hatch had declared my claim a political ploy. He had even accused Senator Metzenbaum of leaking the confidential FBI report to the press, though he later apologized for this unsupported accusation. While declaring that he took sexual harassment seriously and was sympathetic to its victims, Hatch had decided days before my testimony that my statements about my experience were untrue, apparently, at least in part, because I was too old and/or too educated to be sexually harassed.
When Senator Hatch said that I was not “some young, high school secretary” but “a Yale law graduate,” his information was not faulty, but the conclusions he apparently drew from it were. First, Hatch may have meant that harassment is directed only at young women whose education does not include a college degree. In fact, women of all age groups and educational levels are victims of sexual harassment. And though I was twenty-five when I worked for Clarence Thomas, well within the range of twenty-two to thirty-five whom harassers tend to target, women in their forties, fifties, and sixties are also sexually harassed. Nor does a woman’s education or profession exempt her. Dr. Frances Conley, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University, left her position there after years of experiencing sexual harassment and other forms of sex discrimination. One of the most patently offensive incidents occurred when one of her male colleagues fondled her under the operating table during a surgical procedure she was performing. In a 1989 survey, 52 percent of the women engineers polled reported that sexual harassment was the greatest frustration of their work. By suggesting that only high school secretaries are subject to sexual harassment, Hatch painted a picture of harassment victims that was misinformed and patronizing. He promoted a myth that excluded most of the workingwomen in the country from his sympathy, since most who experience harassment do not fit Hatch’s description.
Hatch may also have been implying that lawyers, particularly those who graduate from Yale, are more likely to raise complaints about harassment than other women. Again he was wrong. While lawyers often defend the rights of others, there is no evidence that they are more forthcoming in complaints about violations of their own civil rights. I know of only one major case in which a woman lawyer brought a claim of sex discrimination against her employer, Hishon v. King and Spaulding, in 1980.
Most sexual harassment cases do not involve women lawyers as plaintiffs. Yet one should not conclude that sexual harassment