TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028109.000

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                                                                                NATION, Page 24

SUPREME COURT

Woman Power


Outraged over the Thomas confirmation, women vow political
revenge. But like civil rights leaders, they face rank-and-file
divisions.

By PRISCILLA PAINTON -- With reporting by Michael Duffy and Julie
Johnson/Washington and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago


    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 reato 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.


________________________________________________________________
THE THOMAS AGENDA


    Among key issues that Clarence Thomas will have to grapple
with on the high bench:

    -- CHURCH AND STATE: In Lee v. Weisman, the court will be
asked to decide whether public school authorities violate the
Establishment Clause when they allow a commencement speaker to
mention God in an invocation. Agrument: Nov. 6.

    -- PORNOGRAPHY: In Jacobson v. the U.S., the court will have
to rule whether government agents had a right to launch a child-
pornography sting operation. Postal inspectiors obtained
Jacobson's name from an adult bookstore's mailing list, then
targeted him with X-rated catalogs and arrested him after he
ordered a kid-porn magazine. Jacobson is pleading that he was
entrapped. Agrument: Nov. 6.

    -- CIVIL RIGHTS: In Ayers v. Mabus, the court will have to
determine whether Mississippi has dismantled its "dual" higher-
education system. Enrollment at formerly white and black
campuses continues to follow a pattern of de facto segregation.
Agrument: Nov. 13.