TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102191/1021105.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.0 KB | 167 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 50

COVER STORIES

The Ultimate Men's Club


As pampered denizens of a virtually all-male bastion, many
Senators were slow to grasp the seriousness of the sexual-
harassment issue

By MARGARET CARLSON -- Reported by Hays Gorey and Nancy Traver/
Washington


    There may be no better place in America for a referendum
on male domination than the U.S. Senate. All white, mostly over
50, cosseted and toadied to by fawning aides, uninhibited by
women, the Senate may be the most visible concentration of
full-frontal prefeminist thinking left.

    If it weren't for that, the Judiciary Committee might have
found a way to evaluate Professor Anita Hill's charges against
Judge Clarence Thomas confidentially. But it was easier to
consign her to the category of she-devils, like Fanne Foxe,
Elizabeth Ray, Tai Collins, Donna Rice, who rise from a public
official's past to bring down a man simply for being, well, a
man. In this postgraduate Skull and Bones, most of whose members
hardly need to worry where their next million is coming from,
it is hard to empathize with someone worried enough about her
career that she would overlook offensive conduct until it became
literally a federal matter.

    Senators don't interact with women as colleagues -- they
have only two -- and most of the other women they come in
contact with are subservient. According to a 1991 study by the
Congressional Management Foundation, women hold 31% of the top
four positions on Senate staffs. Among those, women account for
24% of the very top post of administrative assistant. They earn
78 cents to every dollar their male counterparts pull in. Still,
the preponderance of females is found in the catchall
legislative jobs, where, as one staff member says, "taking good
notes and neatness count."

    When the Senate is not operating like a men's club, it
behaves like a family -- a patriarchal, dysfunctional family.
Not only does the Senate have all the institutionalized forms
of sexism common in the corporate suite, but by dint of its
privileges and power it is one of the few places where acting
like a cross between a rock star and the dictator of a banana
republic is tolerated. One of the sessions during orientation
for congressional spouses is on how to live with a celebrity.
It's an atmosphere, says former Missouri Lieutenant Governor
Harriett Woods, who now heads the National Women's Political
Caucus, where "Senators prey on women as if they were groupies."
One wife has remarked that a reason members spend so much time
at the office is the adoring staff. There's too much reality at
home.

    Despite an overabundance of leather, the offices resemble
living rooms. There are 14 dining rooms, a gym with a sauna and
steam room, and a pool; the women's facility, by contrast, has
been described as "six hair dryers and a Ping-Pong table."

    In the absence of production quotas or a bottom line, the
only measure of per formance in the Senate is how much one
pleases the boss. Much of the work is servile, not intellectual
or history-making. Getting coffee is not a courtesy but part of
the job description; being sent to the boss's house to pick up
a tux and a change of underwear is all in a day's work.

    Although the Senate has no shortage of clerical staff,
female professionals are still expected to act as hostesses,
showing a constituent, a defense contractor or a contributor
around. In a Senate dining room, a young aide delivering papers
to her boss was asked to remove her jacket so that a constituent
could get a better look. She did. To someone operating in that
atmosphere, perhaps, as Senator Arlen Specter said at Friday's
hearing, talk of "women's large breasts" hardly seems such a big
deal.

    While the Senate is full of selfless older women, happy to
substitute the life of the office for a life, it also has a huge
contingent of postfeminist younger women, who think being asked
to walk the dog and clean up after the mutt is the price one
pays for invaluable experience. Says an aide to a Democratic
Senator on the Judiciary Committee: "You know what the code is,
and if you want to be involved, you know what you have to
tolerate. It's happened to me, and I never call anyone on it.
You have to show you are tough enough to take a certain kind of
harassment."

    Fear of hypocrisy may have kept Democrats on the Judiciary
Committee from taking charges of a personal nature seriously.
Certainly Senator Edward Kennedy -- recently shamed for taking
his son and nephew barhopping on a night that ended in an
accusation of rape -- is not the ideal person to sit in judgment
of someone else's sexual manners. The man who waited 10 hours
before reporting that a young female staff member was drowned
in his car at Chappaquiddick, and stonewalled for much of the
subsequent investigation, must have wanted to avoid the moment
that faced him last Tuesday when the situation required a public
statement on Hill's allegation: "The Senate cannot sweep it
under the rug, or pretend that it is not staring us in the
face." Other members have had personal embarrassments as well:
Senator Dennis DeConcini is one of the Keating Five; Senator
Joseph Biden had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race
because of plagiarism; Senator Patrick Leahy had to resign from
the Intelligence Committee after admitting he had leaked a
confidential document.

    After it became impossible to ignore the charges, the
Senate's major preoccupation, like that of an exclusive club,
was an infraction of its bylaws. Senator John Danforth, Thomas'
chief handler, harrumphed, "The cloud of doubt was created by
a violation of the rules of the U.S. Senate"; so Danforth
maintained that the doubt was not valid. Anyway Thomas had given
Danforth his gentleman's word, and that was enough for him. Says
Woods: "It's the male, Yale, class response. It's infuriating
to women because it's the club they never belonged to."

    When a contingent of seven House members marched down the
marble halls of the Senate to the Democratic caucus room to ask
for a meeting about sexual harassment, they were told they
couldn't come in. Said California Congresswoman and Senate
candidate Barbara Boxer: "What could be more symbolic than that
closed door?" Some Senators "got it" better after some
sensitivity training at home. Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan
and Jim Exon said they didn't realize how serious the issue was
until they talked to their wives. Said Boxer: "If there were
more women in the Senate, they wouldn't need to rely on spouses
to tell them what's important to 51% of the American
population."

    The rules of Congress are arcane, often unwritten, and
demand a lifetime of male bonding to understand. It's bad form
to call one's deepest philosophical enemy anything but "my
distinguished colleague," or to continue a political argument
after hours. When cries went up for a list of Capitol Hill check
bouncers, House Speaker Tom Foley protected Democrats and
Republicans alike, as does the Ethics Committee. So ingrained
is the clubbiness that partisanship often seems like a Hulk
Hogan spectacle, faked for the C-SPAN audience.

    But something happened last week that may, for better or
worse, permanently destroy all that comity. Senator Hatch opened
the hearings in disgust, saying that if the Democrats had only
asked for a closed executive session, the committee would have
been spared its Friday circus. Senator Alan Simpson, who
usually manages to hide his meanness behind an Andy Rooney
facade, warned Hill that she would be "injured, and destroyed
and belittled and hounded and harassed -- real harassment,
different from the sexual kind, just plain old
Washington-variety harassment." What debates over the budget,
arms control, abortion or the gulf war did not destroy was
finished off by televised hearings that stripped bare the
sensibilities of two witnesses and the Senators who questioned
them. The club may never be the same again.