Women Angered by Inaction on Thomas Charge

As Emily Tynes watched Anita Faye Hill’s face on television Monday talking about Judge Clarence Thomas, she thought she recognized the same deep, familiar anger that had welled up inside her back when she was in college and a respected professor began sexually harassing her.

“Damn it, I didn’t know enough to say anything then,” said Tynes, a Washington, D.C., communications consultant, on Tuesday. “But now, at least I know how to scream!”

Together with a colleague, Kathy Bonk, she sent out faxes to every local woman she knew, urging them to “just show up on the Senate steps during the Senate vote the way the Russian people took to the streets during the coup.”

About 200 women showed up on the steps Tuesday for the spontaneous protest. Across the country, meanwhile, untallied thousands of others were doing a similar slow burn--outraged that the U.S. Senate would consider handing Thomas a lifetime post on the Supreme Court without a full investigation of claims that he had sexually harassed Hill, a former employee.

By late in the day, the Senate had in fact postponed the vote on Thomas for a week. Thomas himself asked for the delay, while vehemently denying the charges.

The delay is expected to give the Senate Judiciary Committee time to hear from Thomas and from Hill, a University of Oklahoma law professor who claimed that Thomas had routinely and suggestively talked to her about pornographic sex when she worked for him in Washington.

Still, women’s anger was little assuaged by what one woman called an “intermission in this all-male game.”

From Atlanta to Beverly Hills, from law firm conference rooms to the coffee rooms, women with little in common except for memories of harassments they themselves had experienced said they could not remember any issue that had so galvanized them.

“The last time women felt so strongly about anything was the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro to candidacy for vice president in 1984,” said Lani Guinere, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Ferraro herself stepped forward Tuesday to reveal that when she was an 18-year-old typist, she had been sexually harassed by her boss standing close to her, jiggling coins in his pocket in a way that sent unmistakable sexual signals. Ultimately, she said, she quit the job.

“Today, you should not have to put up with that kind of behavior,” she said. If the Senate does not fully investigate Hill’s allegations, she added, “it will send two messages. One is: Women don’t have the right to complain. The other is: If it’s a woman’s word against a man, people won’t believe the woman.”

Before the decision to postpone the confirmation vote, senators’ phones were ringing.

“Many women just stopped their workday to get on the phone to urge a halt to this process,” said Kim Wardlaw, 37, first vice president of Women Lawyers Assn. of Los Angeles. “It was like a train speeding toward its destination and people were just getting off saying, hey, this just can’t go ahead because it is dead wrong.”

At issue, many women argued, was not the validity of Anita Hill’s charges, but the senators’ reaction to them.

“Do you think that if (Supreme Court Justice) Sandra Day O’Connor had been accused of showing pornographic photos and making sexual suggestions to a younger male that (her confirmation by the Senate) would not at least have been delayed and probably denied . . .?” said Holly Kendig, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers.

“Women have maybe 20 years of growing work force experience in the man’s world,” said Susan McHenry, executive editor of Emerge magazine, a monthly aimed at educated African-Americans, in Manhattan.

“That collective experience is what has been scratched here. Any woman who goes to work everyday immediately understood this. And immediately understood that the male Senate wasn’t going to do anything about it without being pushed.”

Rich women, poor women, black women and white women, seemed to find in their anger something in common that burst through the normal societal courtesies.

“How come everybody cared enough about the fact that (Douglas H.) Ginsburg had smoked marijuana to force him to withdraw his nomination for the Supreme Court, and nobody in the Senate cares when Judge Thomas apparently violated another law that is equally, if not more, important?” demanded novelist Judith Krantz at a Beverly Hills book party.

“How come one law counts and the other doesn’t?”

Judith Cohen, owner of International Records in Atlanta, became visibly shaken when talking about the Anita Hill situation.

“Most people in Congress don’t understand that sexual abuse is often verbal, not just physical abuse, that women put up with it all the damn time,” she said. “I can understand why she never came forward. Look at what’s happening to her right now. . . . It’s the same old stuff over and over again.”

Several black women said they felt Hill might have stirred more sympathy and concern from an all-white male Senate Judiciary Committee if she herself had been white.

One of the most prominent critics was Mary Frances Berry, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who said the initial response of the Senate to Hill’s allegations “displayed a lack of sensitivity to the concerns of a black woman. It was as if they shrugged their shoulders and dismissed her allegations with a wave of their hand.”

Some women hoped that the next week may bring a watershed look at the problem of sexual harassment.

“I figure she (Anita Hill) is a pretty credible person, said Melissa Echtermeyer, 23, as she worked behind the counter at the Bavarian Bakery in downtown Denver. As a cappuccino machine hissed behind her, she said: “But I think it is going to take something traumatic to happen to men, or a significant woman in their life before their awareness about sexual harassment is heightened.”

Still, some women said Tuesday they did not feel they could discuss the issue with their boyfriends or husbands. One woman said her boyfriend was convinced by watching Hill’s face on television that she was not credible because her speech was sometimes halting, and that she lost any credibility when Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) produced telephone logs showing Hill had called Thomas 11 times after leaving his employ in 1984.

But it was precisely the less-than-certainty with which Hill spoke that reinforced her credibility with some women, because they remembered times when they felt the same way, torn between trying to please their bosses and walking out.

What is now called “sexual harassment” in the workplace is so commonplace that some women said they had to jog their memories to sift through individual incidents. “There are so many, you have to grade them when they come along, thinking, OK, is this the one that I can’t live with? or this?” said one woman.

“How many women have to force themselves to have cordial relationships every day with men who have power over them?” McHenry said. “Look around you, men! It’s no big deal. We deal with that everyday. You just don’t get it because you’ve been mentors too long.”

Linda Mann, a clinical research studies nurse from Northridge, said: “Just the word ‘Baby’ added to the phrase, ‘You’ve come a long way’ illustrates the lack of validation given to women’s concerns.”

Staff writers Sam Fulwood and Dara McLeod in Washington, Ann Rovin in Denver, Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Lianne Hart in Houston, Tracy Shryer in Chicago and Doug Conner in Seattle contributed to this story.