Supreme Court: Woman Power

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

A few Americans have picked over the detritus of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill bonfire and found something they can use. The owners of Spytech, a firm that supplies pocketbook-size recorders, came up with a new ad campaign: "Sexually harassed? Prove it. Stop it. Sue." Jesse Jackson, the sloganeer of American politics, is now talking about "economic harassment." And law schools such as the University of Miami's are preparing courses on sexual harassment.

But mostly what was discovered in the wreckage of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings was the charred skeletons of some American myths. When the 52-to-48 vote was over Tuesday night, confirming Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice by the lowest margin of this century, some Americans had to give up a few illusions about fair play and about the complicated dynamics of racial and sexual solidarity. They learned that a woman who comes forward in good faith to make an accusation can become the accused, that skin color matters more to blacks than ideology, and that gender matters less to women than the causes women espouse in the name of feminism.

This last lesson is perhaps most startling to America's feminist groups. Two weeks ago, backed by angry calls and letters from women across the country, they demonstrated their clout by pressuring the Senate into investigating Anita Hill's story. When Hill walked into the Senate Caucus Room, women across America saw her as the bearer of an old secret about the ugly politics of accommodation between men and women on the job. But by the time Hill walked out of the hearings, a majority of women had decided she did not speak for them. On the eve of the vote, polls showed that 55% of men found Thomas more believable and that 49% of women agreed.

Faced with this female skepticism, some feminists argue that Hill lost the ideological battle in part because she lost the tactical one. For one thing, she missed prime time. "Anita Hill spoke to 5 million Americans during the day. Thomas spoke to 30 million that night," says University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich. More important, perhaps, Hill's putative Democratic allies on the Senate Judiciary Committee sat back as judges while the Republicans played the role of prosecutors, ultimately painting the Yale-educated law professor as a delusionary careerist with a split personality and a tendency to cull lawbooks for references to pornographic film stars. "The asymmetry was tough to watch," says a top strategist for the Democrats. "The Democrats have always been the defenders of women's issues, but when one of those issues was brought to center stage, they caved. Hill was savaged for three days by Republicans who played to win. No one cross-examined Thomas in the same tone."

In the end, however, Hill lost her own female constituency not because of poor timing or poor friends in the Senate but because of an unspoken factor that has kept the women's movement from becoming a consistent force in American politics: class. In office after office last week, informal polls often turned up the same split: secretaries sided with Thomas while their male and female bosses took Hill's side. When J.C. Alvarez came forward as a witness for the judge and described Hill as aloof and ambitious, she played a real-life version of Tess, the secretary pitted against a Wall Street shrew in the movie Working Girl. Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for George Bush, calls it a division "between clever people who talk loudly in restaurants and those who seat them." However they are described, the two groups are separated by privilege. "Both working-class women and highly educated women put up with sexual harassment every day," says Anne Reingold, media director for the Democratic Party. "But the perception among working-class women is that a Yale degree just gives you the right to make a federal case out of it. Besides, if you can't get a good-paying job somewhere else, what good is that degree anyway?"

Instead of dwelling on last week's setback, women around the country lashed out at the Senate's 98 male members and threatened to target those who put Thomas on the high court. They jammed the phone lines at the Democratic Party. They staged demonstrations aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, from Washington to San Francisco. They joined or donated money to women's groups and generally vented their outrage. "We will no longer beg for our rights from men in power. We will replace them and take power ourselves," Patricia Ireland, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, told the Washington Post. Said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority: "The Senate did more in one week to underscore the critical need for more women in the Senate than feminists have been able to do in 25 years."

There was predictable talk about forming a third political party dedicated to women's causes. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- headed by Virginia Senator Charles Robb, who cast his vote for Thomas -- took a double hit. Its annual fund raiser in Washington was picketed by feminists, and the liberal direct-mail firm of Craver, Matthews, Smith announced it was dropping the group as a client. Some of the party's most loyal contributors, including MCA chairman Lew Wasserman and Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman, put the party on notice that they would not raise a dime for the 11 Democratic Senators who gave Thomas his slim victory.

But even as they threatened retaliation, women's groups were forced to confront the volatility and fragmentation of their movement. "We can talk about our anger, but are we angry enough to do the hard things, to be single- minded and do the things that need to be done to play to win?" asked Emily Tynes, a Washington consultant to liberal groups. And what does playing to win mean? Does it mean targeting Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who voted for Thomas but is pro-choice?

Since its peak two decades ago, the women's movement has spawned subgroups whose diverse interests range from pushing day care to combating pornography. In some ways, feminist politics have expanded too much to keep women under one tent. In the Thomas-Hill aftermath, feminists took their energy in different directions: Geraldine Jensen, who heads a Toledo-based organization that seeks to strengthen child-support laws, says she plans to use the recent performance of the Senate Judiciary Committee to illustrate to her supporters why tough enforcement legislation has failed. "Now people will understand me when I say that these are the ones making the decisions," she says.

While such lessons may be inspiring, they are not likely to sweep a large number of women into office. Women's groups christened 1990 the Political Year of the Woman, but only one of the seven women who ran for the Senate last year, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, was elected; she voted for Thomas last week. In Congress pro-choice activists have helped pass a bill to overturn the gag rule that now forbids doctors to discuss abortion at federally funded clinics, but they cannot muster enough votes to override Bush's veto. Next week the Senate will take up Senator John Danforth's civil rights bill, which for the first time would award compensatory damages to victims of sexual harassment. But even after the recent outpouring of testimony about the problem, congressional lobbyists are not sure the Senate will produce the votes to override a presidential veto. When a similar bill came before Governor Pete Wilson in California last week, he killed it.

Though Bush has consistently frustrated the feminists, anyone hoping to defeat him on women's issues in 1992 may have an uphill battle. The gender gap, which is the difference in support between men and women, for a President yawned as wide as 14% in the 1988 campaign. It has now shrunk to only 5%.

Ironically, many women are hoping that their movement will get a strong boost next year if the Supreme Court decides to overturn or restrict the abortion rights granted by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Major decisions are often handed down in late June or early July, at the end of the court's annual session. An antiabortion ruling then would give speakers at the Democrats' July convention the ammunition to denounce the work of G.O.P.-appointed Justices. Republicans have reason to worry: the issue divides their party and has already cost them the governorships of Virginia, New Jersey and Texas, as well as a congressional seat in a special election in Massachusetts this year. Says Massachusetts pollster Gerry Chervinsky: "People may not think sexual harassment is a voting issue, but they will vote on abortion."

If feminist leaders have important lessons to learn from the Thomas hearings, so do the nation's civil rights advocates. By branding his ordeal a "high-tech lynching," Thomas turned his near lost battle into a referendum about skin color. His support among blacks moved from the mid-50% range to 71% on the eve of the vote. Until then, Democrats had countered Bush's masterly selection of a black conservative by calculating that Southern Senators, who were elected with thin white support and a strong black turnout, would not be penalized by whites for voting against a black man -- or by blacks for rejecting a conservative. But with the appearance of Hill, race won out over gender. "The Southern Senators are concerned about their black base," says Ronald Walters, a Howard University political scientist. "They got it right. The civil rights leaders got it wrong."

That is the same gap that Republicans have attempted to exploit in their three-year-old, off-and-on effort to wrest at least 20% of the black vote from the Democrats. Bush made his contribution last week. "I don't believe that the civil rights leaders all speak for the American people on a matter of this nature," he said. That challenge to a traditional Democratic constituency comes at a time when blacks are expressing growing disenchantment with the party -- not by joining the ranks of Republicans but simply by not supporting Democrats. In 1988 black-voter turnout was down 5% overall and 20% in major metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. This sense of alienation persisted in 1990, when black dissatisfaction with Democrat Neil Hartigan in Illinois virtually elected Republican Jim Edgar as Governor. Last year the Joint Center for Political Studies, a policy center focused on black politics, found that the number of blacks identifying themselves as Democratic had decreased.

Still, the Republicans may not be able to take advantage of black disappointment in the Democrats any more than feminists can exploit the anger that some women feel over the Senate's distrust of Hill. For what last week made clear is that in the politics of sex and race, the rules are always changing.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Julie Johnson/Washington and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago