The Organiztion Woman

...Why did you go back...

...And clearly, Hill’s embrace of the “easier” solution was a forgivable, human response to an extremely stressful situation...

...I mean, my goodness gracious,” burst Ellen Wells, explaining why she didn’t advise Hill to go forward...

...Just getting yours wasn’t enough...

...You think, yes, perhaps this job is secure,” she later elaborated, “but maybe they will post me in an office in a comer with a telephone and The Washington Post to read from nine to five, and that won’t get me anywhere...

...While women obviously had no monopoly on integrity (everybody knows a few real-life Lady Macbeths), writers from Freud to Carol Gilligan noted that the average woman tended to weigh her choices-in relationships, daily life, work-in a context far broader than the rewards they brought her personally...

...To forsake the organization, stand up to the man, and insist that a powerful wrong be corrected-that was Anita Hill’s alternative back in 1982...

...There’s a vast degree of difference between golf games and criminal sexual harassment, but the continuum is real...

...there were no whispers of “whiner,” ‘‘lesbian,’’ or “prude...

...S]tructurally speaking, your boss has life-and-death power over you,” cautioned Games Mother Never Taught You, a late-seventies bestseller...

...Even if it goes against his nature,” Castiglione lectured, the savvy courtier “has the discretion to discern what pleases his prince, and the wit and judgment to act accordingly, and the considered resolve to make himself like what he may instinctively dislike...

...Ceol wrote her story, giving Doggett’s theory past-the-jump placement...

...In fact, that’s my problem with the people who now cast Hill as some sort of reluctant Joan of Arc...

...In other words, Hill did what men have been doing since Peter denied Jesus in a Jerusalem courtyard: compromising personal principle to promote immediate self-interest...

...It was a conformity many educated women treated with healthy skepticism even as they entered the workforce in droves during and after World War 11...

...Women’s characteristic predilection toward empathy-the quality that pre-Thatcherite peaceniks had promised would foster world harmony-was, in the new cosmology, a selfdestructive vice...

...So you are quiet and you are ashamed and you sit there and you take it...

...At one point, she noted, the stress his actions provoked caused her to be hospitalized for five days...

...But at least Peter feared for his life...

...What was known as superior servitude in the Renaissance rat race, modern man called playing the corporate game: winning friends and influencing people as a means to financial success...

...Thus women who refused to compete weren’t just abandoning their own chances for professional success, they were lessening the likelihood that their “sisters” would be able to achieve it, too...

...And that soothing conventionality was precisely what the contracts lawyer craved...

...It is obvious,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex...

...His conversations with her were “very ugly...

...I suspect Clarence Thomas is a dangerous man...

...The weekend Hill testified, Ceol was covering the chaos for The Washington Times...

...Like Hill, Ceol felt her integrity had been affronted and the public misled...

...And, finally, as a heavily and conventionally credentialed professional, she had far more public credibility (and career options, if worse came to worst) than thousands of housekeepers, clerks, and secretaries subjected to similar outrage...

...And that self-denial may seem to the average modern woman a reasonable price to pay for selfpromotion...

...The number of women leaving “nurturing” professions like teaching and social work to pursue law and business degrees skyrocketed in the eighties...

...But to a new generation of working women, that eternal difference was about as useful as a gold-plated Hoover...

...I can only say that when I made the decision to just withdraw from the situation . . . that I may have shirked a duty, a responsibility that I had,” admitted Hill at one point-only one point-during her testimony...

...She quit her In today’s ethical cosmos, the prudent Anita Hill, not the impulsive Dawn Ceol, is In accordance with 9’ Anita Hill asked for no help when she was the current, abysmal market victimized...

...While some books, like Marilyn Loden’s Feminine Leadership, noted that in the long run, female climbers would achieve power and “humanize” corporate culture, it was perfectly clear what had to come fnst...

...When Hill was asked by the Judiciary Committee why she had finally decided to speak out, her response was resoundingly devoid of the sense of principle women now attempt to impose on her actions...

...The fact that men remained the gatekeepers of the professional world was one of the great barriers to equal opportunity...

...But what her supporters elide is that Hill could have made that choice-as did Rosa Parks, who risked her job as a seamstress and even her life to stand up (or sit down) for her rights...

...Time invoked Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks...

...A remarkable amplitude of empathy, women discovered, had remarkably little market value...

...Star struck Jesse Jackson compared her to Jesus, and the press wasn’t too far behind...

...Yet Hill chose to endure...

...She awoke the next morning to find the original headline-“ THOMAS ACCUSER LAUDED, ASSAILED”transformed to “MISS HILL PAINTED As a-lawyer, she fully understood her rights...

...This “outer-directed man,” as Harvard sociologist David Riesman observed in the fifties, understood that he must tailor his behavior, indeed his very character, to win the winks and nods of the corporate powers that might reward him...

...I think that is something that a woman in that situation would do,” Hill’s friend Ellen Wells observed in her corroborating testimony...

...Much has been made of Thomas’s role as the head of the EEOC...

...To countless sixties feminists, it was the linchpin of peaceful oneworldism...

...Take up tennis...

...She came forward, Hill explained, because “my career is on solid ground...

...Of course, when women were at home raising families, that moral acuity seemed well and good for the world...

...Sole sisters In the 16th century, Baldesar Castiglione issued the prototype of 20th-century America’s corporate how-to: careful instructions for courtiers seeking success in the Renaissance’s vicious royal circles...

...While Hill repeatedly denied that she attempted to benefit from Thomas’s patronage, it’s pretty hard not to suspect that, out there in the hinterlands, the ability to snag the head of the EEOC for a civil rights conference or a personal reference might be worth a few professionRoosevelt...

...It was also a selfish one...

...The message was, from all angles, pretty clear...

...There is no way you can leapfrog, bypass, overrule, ignore, challenge, disobey, or criticize your boss and not get penalized in the game...

...Our right to choose As Anita Hill’s life suggests, such pragmatism tends to pay off decently...

...In accordance with her “best judgment”-her essential conservatismshe asked for no help when she was victimized...

...And as women raise her up today, we may also be lowering our standards for both personal virtue and a more humane working world...

...Learn to get out there so you can do these things to maintain your contacts...

...And last year, Mademoiselle magazine looked with bewilderment at descriptions of the nineties as a more relaxed, less careerist decade...

...I shall never understand that," the senator concluded, "and it remains one of my great quandaries...

...they can decide that integrity matters more than a rung up on the corporate ladder...

...It just doesn’t make her very brave...

...But the supporters who use these two truths to make Hill’s passivity more palatable might better use them to disdain it...

...I believe Anita Hill...

...In the new feminist ethic of “work machismo”-l4-hour workdays, ruthless competition-“pulling all-nighters has become a status symbol (again...

...Hill wasn't delusional...

...But why better...

...That doesn’t, of course, make Hill a scoundrel...

...Katherine Boo is an editor a/The Washington Monthly...

...Who wants to be a feminist martyr,” snapped a friend who made exactly Hill’s choice...

...If she’s not the brightest star from Yale Law’s class of ’83, at a relatively young age she has achieved tenure and status at a large law school-an accomplishment that, had she solicited notoriety as a whistleblower at 25, might well have been a pipe dream...

...Yet as women chisel the modest Hill into a latter-day feminist hero, they may be validating a radically unfeminist, unheroic choice...

...As the phone logs indicate, Hill used her personal relationship with Thomas repeatedly over the years-for references, for assistance in getting a grant, for networking...

...tives was gleaned from “intuition,” “body language,” and other rigid psychological tests, testified to her tendency to fantasize...

...You can open up any women’s magazine and you can go to seminars on how women are supposed to learn to network since we don’t have the Old Boys Club...

...Hill feared for her career...

...How appalling, opponents rightfully noted, that the ultimate advocate of American civil rights might have been a vulgar violator of the same...

...We do not, said Simone de Beauvoir archly, “confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness,” and social scientists tended to agree...

...One reason, she explained, “was a sense that I could not afford to antagonize a person in such a high position...

...It was the gravamen of the trial of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings: the unsettling notion that, after so much humiliation, Hill would follow her boss to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and continue her relationship with him through phone calls and social gatherings throughout the decade...

...Congressional phone lines crackled with sympathy and outrage...

...Still, you don’t have to dust off ancient icons to find examples of feminine courage...

...Indeed, if we remove the mantle of sisterhood that disciples have draped on her actions, we find, not a feminist martyr, but the philosophical kin of Clarence Thomas, that stalwart opponent of affirmative action...

...Could it be that, for all her religious sensibility, all her suffering, Anita Hill was a careerist...

...When Felice Schwartz concocted the Mommy Track, the real story was how few professional women wanted to get on it...

...How could it possibly be that an intelligent, educated woman would continue a relationship with a man who had showered her with such a "foul, foul presentation of verbiage," who had inflicted upon her the greatest humiliation of her life...

...It is equally obvious, she added, that “it is the masculine values that prevail...

...Repeatedly...

...If she had come forward in 1982, she would’ve faced the firestorm: a neophyte accusing a prominent black Republican, a rare and heavily protected species...

...Instead, as Oklahoma’s tenure committee lucubrated over Hill’s future, no messy accusations obscured that glistening resume...

...Like thousands of corporate technicians before her-Bill Moyers to LBJ, Michael Deaver to Ronald Reagan, Pete Williams to Dick Cheney-she had hitched her wagon early to a star, and as Thomas grew increasingly influential, no mere personal humiliation would keep her from exploiting that connection, both in government and outside it...

...Thus, two decades after Riesman chronicled the moral poverty of the corporate poltroon, faux-feminist magazines began appropriating for their sex the brownnosing and venal chicanery that men had so long mastered...

...They were disgusting...

...Perhaps I should have taken angry or even militant steps, both when I was in the agency or after I left it,” she testified, “but I must confess to the world that the course that I took seemed the better, as well as the easier, approach...

...In other words, AS ‘FANTASIZER,’ ” and the lead rewritten to legitimize Doggett’s conclusions...

...Still, before you do, girls, consider this: “It will also destroy the possibility that your career objectives will get any support from him...

...As women who work daily in an unaccommodating world, we may justify Hill’s decade of silence because we’ve come to accept the moral calculus that undergirded it-the necessity of muting one’s principles in the name of some future professional accomplishment...

...It would remain, he said wearily, "a puzzlement for me forever...

...that I have said was that I intended toI hoped to keep a cordial professional relationship with that individual,” testified Hill...

...I was aware . . . that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career...

...But their aspirations hadn’t budged...

...The trouble was, she forsook what women have often claimed to have: a fundamental sense of their larger moral responsibility...

...But Anita Hill’s choice of silence, if we’re willing to see it, is a study in those implications...

...It was a “reasonable” choice, as Hill put it during her testimony...

...Yet she withheld information the public should have known in order to retain her patron and, thus, her career...

...She didn’t give any help, either...

...asked the horrified biographer...

...Women were also 50 percent more likely to live below the poverty line...

...By the end of the eighties, the rhetoric had softened, but that didn’t mean women weren’t still kissing ass and popping Rolaids-or that the corporate world had changed enough that they didn’t have to...

...Anita Hill didn’t...

...magazine’s chief functions in the seventies was to celebrate women who had unnicely accrued professional success...

...Perhaps...

...If the intervening decade of deracination seemed an eminently acceptable compromise to Hill, she was not alone in her assessment...

...But Hill had a public obligation too...

...Forget Sojourner Truth...

...And to the Ameri;an working woman, she sure wasn’t very mysterious...

...Alan Simpson was befuddled...

...To make the dog-eat-dog ethic more palatable, advised another early-coronary manual, The Right Moves, “eliminate the notion that the people with whom you work are your friends”-advice Anita Hill apparently took to heart in keeping her silence...

...To Republicans, it showed she was a liar...

...In discussions about Thomas with colleagues, she lauded his performance...

...They were very dirty...

...Blut that was my best judgment at the time...

...And so you don’t bum your bridges...

...Like her judgment, Hill, she understood that the professional cost of following her conscience would be considerable, especially in for journalists...

...Like so many other minorities and women, Hill had accepted the harsh bootstrap ethic of the Reagan era, internalized it, and endured...

...And once in the workforce, they weren’t noticeably easing up...

...I survived, didn ’t I? Hill’s choices seem to say...

...Millions of women, from Nina Totenberg to Wanda Baucus to Dennis DeConcini’s mother, it seemed, had been ashamed, sitting there, taking it...

...I believe her recounting of implied threats, insinuating language, sexual pressure...

...Take up golf, ladies...

...The New York Times attributed her coming forward to “the moral courage of Eleanor of the things...

...What are they staying up all night for...

...Perhaps, like thousands of senators and investment bankers and, uh, Supreme Court nominees before her, she chose to compromise herself to advance her own career...

...Games Mother Never Taught You ordered ambitious women to stop their lousy habit of “helping everyone but themselves” and “learn to act more like a man...

...As Hill indicated explicitly and unapologetically during her testimony, given the choice between doing the right thing and making the right career moves, she repeatedly chose the latter...

...In Edward Erikson’s view, the “mother variable”-the compassion and humanity of women -gave them the power not just to mitigate the impersonal tendencies of corporate man but to prevent the nuclear destruction of the planet...

...Clarence Thomas was a powerful man...

...One recent howto, Taking Stock, advises women subjected to sexual harassment to threaten reporting it (but not to actualLy report it) only as a last resort...

...As a black woman, she knew better than most people how pervasive and insidious discrimination can be...

...The Organiztion Woman The real reason Anita Hill stayed silent by Katherine Boo After Benito Mussolini s death in 1945, secretary after cabinet wife after maid came for- i ward to declare that she had been raped by Il Duce...

...Easier is indisputable...

...Not for today’s women, thank you...

...Olne a1 miles...

...It was also clear that women’s competitiveness in the workforce had become an issue not of “personal fulfillment” but of economic necessity...

...But as 14 of the most ambitious men in America pondered the psychic mysteries of Anita Hill, none seemed to recognize that the woman in front of them was not much different from them...

...Yes, it seems coldly idealistic to suppose anyone should jeopardize her career for some amorphous public interest-and colder still when that person is a young black woman who eventually came forward only to find her character on trial...

...women in pumps took to the streets bearing militant signs...

...While the majority of Americans didn’t quite accept that a sane woman would endure so much psychological strain simply to keep a job, poll after poll showed that many professional women do...

...By the mid-seventies, real wages began to decline and traditional wage earners found it more and more difficult to support families on a single income...

...But it’s important for women to acknowledge, no matter how caught up we are in the quest for professional equality, that she -we-could have...

...And I did not want, early on, to bum all the bridges to the EEOC...

...In these baedeckers of corporate mastery, issues larger than securing the boss’s approval-standing up for one’s beliefs, showing compassion to others, even turning out a socially worthwhile product-don’t come up too often, which is probably just as well, considering the values advocated when they do...

...And in today’s world, coming forward to testify to one’s victimization-to publicize a private humiliationmay be even more painful than the harassment itself...

...During her testimony, Hill described the harassment by solid ground.yy Thomas as one of the mos;“embarrass[ing] and humiliat[ing]” experiences of her life...

...As one Village Voice writer exulted, “Anita Hill is the black woman I’ve been waiting to see on TV all my life...

...Blinded by ambition, she didn’t see it...

...She might have lost her livelihood, derailed her promising career...

...That alienating ethos, once largely the province of men in gray flannel suits, is now so entrenched in the working woman’s world that few of us step back to examine its moral implications...

...There was little time for quasi-Marxist social transformations...

...She eventually stood when it came at minimal pro- “my career is on fessional cost...

...The mass recognition triggered by Hill’s testimony only confirmed Wells’s sad assertion...

...Sexual harassment, especially when chained to threats of professional sabotage, is a peculiarly insidious kind of victimization...

...That sustained contact was one of the few undisputed facts of the case...

...And that’s a distinction worth remembering, because it tells us something, not just about Anita Hill, but about ourselves...

...Indeed, it was only after her connection to Thomas had been exploited-after she had secured tenure at the University of Oklahoma Law School and success in her own rightthat she began to view coming forward as a legitimate option...

...But as Anita Hill’s testimony made clear Why did Anita Hill decide to again and again, sacrificing in speak out now...

...She wasn’t totally helpless...

...She might well have been a martyr...

...give any help, either, she was well positioned to make a stand for women everywhere (and especially in Thomas’s office...

...As women began hitting the glass ceiling en masse, it became increasingly clear that the corporate world wasn’t suddenly going to start valuing compassion over killer instinct...

...One cannot, the woman replied coolly, "refuse a man of such importance...

...Now let everyone else sink or swim on her own...

...College educated women still earned only 59 cents for every dollar made by mena ratio that had held for 25 years...

...Consider the not noticeably hagiographic Dawn Ceol, a journalist who also confronted the moral crucible during the Thomas hearings...

...Women can choose principle over professional status...

...Research assistance was provided by Coates Lear...

...And that’s what is lost as professional women a f f i the Hill ethic today: respect for women’s historical, and critical, tendency to sacrifice personal interest in the name of something larger than self...

...One woman described to a biographer being thrown on the floor and ravaged brutally on repeated occasions...

...She came forward, Hill the name of honor-the standard barometer of courage -wasn’t really her modus and fell on principle, but only explained to the COlllmittee, because operandi...

...She might have been speaking of the Fortune 500 in the eighties...

...Many of us are trying desperately, in Castiglione’s phrase, to like what we instinctively dislike...

...As an employee of the EEOC, she was a prominent cog in the agency assigned to encourage coming forward, speaking out, ending the stigma, and ultimately the practice, of sexual abuse...

...Like most other corporate conformists, Hill confronted a Hobson’s choice...

...For once, the materialist creed of the paperback dovetailed with more sophisticated feminist thinking...

...Hence one of Ms...

...She didn’t job that day...

...By the time Anita Hill and millions of other women entered the workforce in the early eighties, dozens of such manuals for women were on the market...

...Only 2 percent more were in professional specialties in 1988 than in 1973...

...Ron Ziegler or Robert Gates might be more apt comparisons...

...You’d do the same thing...

...And indeed, Thomas, if guilty of such crass intimidation, should be expelled from public life...

...It was the why that no one seemed to agree on...

...Women, not the corporate world, would have to do the changing...

...To Democrats, Hill's behavior placed her in the classic category of the repressed and longsuffering victim...

...By refusing for 10 years to speak out against her patron-not just to stop the man perpetuating the evil, but to set an example for other women or minorities facing discriminationHill hurt other women...

...Blinded by our own ambition, we can barely make it out either...

...You generally wanted the people around you to get theirs too-even if it meant you had to give a little away...

...And in the long run, that moral myopia may do far more damage to women’s interests than the ascendance of one Honorable Clarence Thomas...

...That Sunday night, John Doggett, a man whose insight into Hill’s mothe model: a woman who subsumed integrity for the “greater good” of professional achievement-who did, in short, what ambitious men have often done...

...Nevertheless, compromise in the pursuit of professional success often has a secondary moral cost-an abstraction made perfectly concrete in the Thomas-Hill relationship...