Why It Turned Out to Be Such a Powder Keg : Charges ignited fury when they appeared to be ignored

It is yet to be determined whether the sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas are true or false. But there can be no doubt that it was women--particularly those who jammed the phone lines and fax lines of their senators--who inspired the Senate’s wise decision Tuesday to delay its confirmation vote on Thomas for one week, until the charges receive a full airing.

After hours of frenzied lobbying and caucusing, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will have hearings to take up the sexual harassment issue.

Thomas requested the delay; at this point, it’s the only reasonable option open to him, and to his accuser, Anita Faye Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma.

The issue of sexual harassment touched a nerve so deep that it brought the U.S. Senate to a temporary halt. Women across the nation were angry. They demanded that the Senate take charges of sexual harassment seriously.

THE ISSUE: What’s astounding about this controversy is not the specifics of the allegations leveled against Judge Thomas; it is that the issue of sexual harassment possessed a nonpartisan, non-ideological power that the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee obviously severely underestimated. It did what the issues of abortion and race failed to do during the hearings: galvanize. The senators just didn’t get it--until the phones started ringing off the hook Monday morning, after the allegations against the nominee became public.

The allegations--stemming from 1981-83, when Hill worked for Thomas--had been brought to the attention of the Judiciary Committee in early September. But a reportedly inconclusive FBI report on Hills’ charges did not come before the committee until just days before it deadlocked, on a 7-7 vote, on Thomas’ confirmation.

None of the senators, even those who voted against him, seemed to fully grasp the potential powder keg in the allegations.

When all this became public Sunday, the slow burn among American women began. Not because women automatically assumed that the allegations were true. The anger stemmed, in large part, from the feeling that the allegations were simply dismissed, waved away, by senators--both Republicans and Democrats, both friends and foes of Thomas. That was what hurt. And thus the anger seethed and erupted to a height where, for a couple of days at least, women had the full attention of the nearly all-male Senate.

THE ANGER: The key to the anger was the separate experience of women and men. In an article today, The Times quotes Washington consultant Emily Tynes recalling an incident in her college days when she was sexually harassed by a respected professor. She was silent then, she said, “But now, at least I know how to scream!”

Thousands of other women did the same, drawing on some long-forgotten or long-suppressed memory of that uneasy feeling when a boss or some other man in a position of power made suggestive and unwelcome remarks--or worse.

The Senate must not misread the outrage: It is directed not at the specifics of Hill’s charges, which have not been proven. It is directed at the Senate’s initial old-boy impulse to quickly dismiss, or at least downplay, the charges.