CHAPTER 6
Empowerment Icons
The women, though incomparable, invited comparisons. “Hillary Rodham Clinton,” in the opinion of the Washington Post’s Martha Sherrill, was “replacing Madonna as our leading cult figure.” “For years,” author Lorrie Moore would assert, “we watched [Hillary Clinton] looking like a nerdier Tina Brown, who in turn looked like a nerdier Princess Di (the 1990s were confusing!).”
These writers, while spot-on, were nonetheless comparing mangoes to kiwis. In the ’80s and ’90s a new brand of feminist was emerging. And yet it wasn’t a matter of Hillary versus Madonna versus anyone. In fact, a diverse range of empowerment icons was on the march, advancing in proud formation. And before we engage with one of them firsthand—Professor Anita Hill—there are a few other trailblazers who deserve special mention.
Later we would come to know Hillary Rodham Clinton as senator, foreign policy architect, humanitarian, and, yes, the first female nominee for president in the 240-year history of the republic. In incalculable ways, she had altered the very perception of what power looked like in this country. But in the ’90s we watched her grow in another way: as a role model for contemporary American women.
Hillary Clinton had always been spiritual, but had resisted drawing undue attention to her Methodist roots. She had always been bent on social change, insisting in her 1969 college commencement address that despite that era’s advances (such as the civil rights struggle and the Peace Corps), “we arrived at Wellesley and found… that there was a gap between expectation and realities.” She had always been a principled, committed feminist. She had advocated for family and children’s rights, later writing a book on the subject, It Takes a Village. She had been a Walmart board member, an accomplished attorney, and a partner in a buttoned-down corporate law firm—at the time an almost exclusively male enclave. She had firmly held the reins—as a spouse, a strategist, and a political scrapper—when her life partner sought higher office.
Hillary Clinton was also a champion of women in the workforce. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, one of her most memorable declarations came as she spoke unapologetically about being a working mother: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” Contrary to the complaints of her detractors, however, she was not belittling American homemakers. She would go on to state, expansively, “Women can make choices… whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood, or some combination.”
A feminist. A lawyer. A political strategist. A working mom. A defender of children’s and women’s rights. These were the cornerstones for building a new type of First Lady (even the title today sounds anachronistic)—and a new type of American politician.
Inevitably, upon first occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she became the public’s. In her memoir Living History, Clinton professed to understand the bargain: “Over the years, the role of First Lady has been perceived as largely symbolic. She is expected to represent an ideal—and largely mythical—concept of American womanhood.” Indeed, she assumed the mantle uncomfortably at first, in full public view.
It is instructive to hear law professor Joan Williams on the subject. Williams, who has written often on sex, gender, and power, tells me, in her office at UC Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, that when the Clintons came to power they were a turn-off to many Americans. “The fact that they were both so openly feminist is what made Hillary into [a martyr, a] Saint Stephen,” Williams recalls. “She gradually began to understand it, through color-by-numbers.… Uppity women get sanctioned every day in workplaces throughout the United States. Hillary [was] the archetype of the Uppity Woman in the early [’90s]. She’s gotten more savvy. She gradually understood that she had to go more ‘femmy.’ Remember the hairstyle change? The problem is, she was acting like a Yale Law graduate. How infuriating. It sets off even more class conflict, because if there’s anything a blue-collar guy feels more affronted by is an upper-class woman who is lording it over him. These were gender rules. [In the 1990s] Hillary did not understand how deeply traditional society still was, and still is.1
“Do I admire Hillary for being Hillary?” Williams wonders aloud. “I admire her so much. But you know what began Hillary’s rehabilitation? When she stood by her man. That’s when Hillary began to get it. She didn’t diss him. And she didn’t leave him.… She lived with someone who humiliated her, and that’s very femmy.… I think she, in her DNA, had begun to understand what you have to do to connect to a deeply sexist public.”
From the early ’90s onward, Hillary Clinton, even more than her husband, was reviled by the right. A solid wall of Lynch Hillary books would swell the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. The sexist slurs were rampant: radio haters and conservative journals routinely called her a witch, the “Lady Macbeth of Arkansas,” and much, much worse. Some, in time, would attack her feminist bona fides head-on, calling her pro-woman stance duplicitous because of her outsize role in the slut-shaming of women who had accused her husband of sexual advances.
Others saw in Clinton a handy caricature of the classic feminist emasculator. Essayist and poet Katha Pollitt would recount the time that conservative pundit Tucker Carlson went so far as to remark, “‘When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs’… in a jokey segment about the Hillary Nutcracker, which crushes walnuts between its steely thighs, yours for only $19.95. The ball-busting theme looms large in the male Hillary-hating imagination—that’s why she can be both a lesbian and a siren who has Bill by the short hairs.”
And while we’re on the subject of hair? Culture critic Laura Kipnis would make the case that many of those who were most disparaging of Hillary Clinton—especially male commentators—would make much ado about her hairdo, possibly as a way of transferring their larger angst onto convenient symbols of female display. They zeroed in on her blondeness, her yokelly big-hair-ness, her lack of a sense of style as well as her preoccupation with style. David Brock, according to Kipnis, would denigrate early Headband Hillary for coming from the “look-like-shit school of feminism.” R. Emmett Tyrrell—“who sounds like an aspirant,” writes Kipnis, “for the Vidal Sassoon endowed chair on the Clinton-hating Right”—would lambast her for having “run through scores of appalling coifs.”2 (Clinton, years later, would enter the same thicket, calling her presidential opponent Donald Trump “an id with hair.”)
So much about her came down, dismissively, to appearance. Clinton, going from wispy bangs to bouffant, feathery to teased, was a perfect mother superior for the Makeover Decade. Her pantsuits alone could merit a grad-school dissertation. To supporter and foe alike, she possessed, by turns, the secret powers of Bewitched’s Samantha, the liberal conviction of Murphy Brown, and the utilitarian chilliness of Martha Stewart. But the barbs, taken one way, were enough to make any rebel proud. To earn this much wrath, Hillary Clinton had to be doing something right. She was, in fact, shaking up the perceived role of women in power in America. And in the process, she was shaking men, and many women, to the core.
How did she reshape what a First Lady was supposed to be? First, she raised the bar in terms of political engagement and policy, obtaining, as Virginia Woolf might have put it, a West Wing room of her own. She raised the bar for First Family power-sharing—taking on the ambitious (albeit ill-fated) health care initiative. She raised the bar for thoughtfulness and empathy in political life, calling for a “politics of meaning”—echoing activist rabbi Michael Lerner’s notion that all people are in need of healing—and advocating for some semblance of a “zone of privacy” that would cocoon individuals’ personal data but also the lives of public officials.3
She even raised the bar for Washington poise—in response to her husband’s extramarital conduct. (Writer Ariel Levy would contend that Clinton became “a walking Rorschach test for our feelings about infidelity.”)4 She led through example, exhibiting survival skills, the value of an iron will, and, as novelist Robert Stone would say in another context, “the courage to go on, which may be the most admirable and irreplaceable of human virtues.”
Through the roughest gales, it was steady Hillary Clinton who assumed the role of the stay-the-course captain. It was she, not Bill, who made the case, after his relationship with Monica Lewinsky came to light, that the Clintons were battling a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” (Though it sounded truly paranoid, paranoia is often the midwife of Washington crisis management.) “Every time he goes down,” Gail Sheehy would comment in Vanity Fair, “she rears up and turns into a lioness, tearing into the political veld to rip the flesh off their enemies.” (Neither Bill nor his minions actually needed “enabler Hillary.” They were in large measure rather expert at such dark arts.) But whatever the case, much of the country venerated her, learned from her, felt for her. Hillary Clinton, during six of her years as First Lady, would occupy the top slot in Gallup’s annual ranking of the most admired women in America. (Starting in 2002, she would top the list fifteen years running.)
True, Hillary, like Bill, had a credibility gap. She was accused of massaging the truth as it suited her. She found herself at the center of political whodunits: the missing Travelgate documents; the missing Whitewater billing records—harbingers of the missing State Department emails that would dog her as she sought the presidency. (At one point during the 2016 campaign, a Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of voters did not consider Hillary Clinton to be “honest and trustworthy.” And the most frequent “first word” that came to voters’ minds when her name was mentioned? “Liar.”)5
Not unlike her husband, she possessed a sense of entitlement that is unseemly in a public servant. “Hillary has an ‘I’ message [on the campaign trail]: I have been abused and misunderstood and now it’s my turn,” the New York Times’s columnist Maureen Dowd would write during that race. “It’s a victim mind-set that is exhausting, especially because the Clintons’ messes are of their own making.” While loyal and legendarily generous to staffers, she was regarded by various critics as a creature of political expediency, who sometimes used people and then cast them aside.
“She has flip-flopped on so many issues of image,” wrote the playwright Wendy Wasserstein in 1998, “that her behavior can justifiably be called erratic. First she defiantly wasn’t baking cookies, then suddenly we were barraged with her recipes for Christmas cookies. Initially, she sandwiched ‘Rodham’ within her name, and then it magically disappeared. When the coast was clear, it slinked back out again.” During Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, in fact, strategists working for her Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, drafted a memo that identified an Achilles’ heel: “She’s driven by political calculation, not conviction.… She prides herself on working the system, not changing it.” Eight years later, when she lost her second bid for the White House, it was said that voters had long ago tired of Madame HRC, ascribing to her personality traits that might have been readily levied against her opponent: greedy,6 vengeful, suspicious, secretive, mercenary, entitled, infuriating, power-hungry, out-of-touch, cold-blooded, untrustworthy… Need I go on?
To others, of course, none of the above was a sign of outright deceit. “Sure, Clinton’s calculating,” columnist Nicholas Kristof would admit as Clinton made her 2016 bid. “She’s not a saint but a politician, and to me this notion that she’s fundamentally dishonest is a bogus narrative.” Author Jonathan Rauch would echo Kristof, citing hacked emails in which Secretary Clinton, in almost Lincolnian fashion, made the case for occasional evasion, for establishing “both a public and a private position.” In Rauch’s view, “she understands that hypocrisy and two-facedness, when prudently harnessed to advance negotiations or avert conflicts, are a public good and a political necessity.”
Hillary Clinton would win a seat in the U.S. Senate, twice. She would go on to run for the presidency, twice, serving in between as the nation’s secretary of state. In that role, she would visit 112 countries, help make advances in women’s rights a global priority, orchestrate the deal that pushed Iran into nuclear negotiations, and restore a level of respect and prestige in American diplomacy that had been squandered during the Bush years.7 She was a feminist, a Democrat, a Boomer, a social activist, a political infighter, a diplomat, and a grandmother. And she was, above all, another inevitable, inescapable Clinton.
But in the 1990s, if there was a cause she championed, first and foremost, it was, in a word, the empowerment of women. And her shining hour of the decade came with her address in China. In 1995, before the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women—an event that attracted fifty thousand attendees from across the globe—Clinton decreed from the podium:
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.… As long as discrimination and inequities remain so commonplace everywhere in the world, as long as girls and women are valued less, fed less, fed last, overworked, underpaid, not schooled, subjected to violence in and outside their homes—the potential of the human family to create a peaceful, prosperous world will not be realized.
In the audience that day in Beijing, many of the listeners cried openly. Here was a woman of conscience, power, and valor who was giving voice to their deepest beliefs as women and as members of the human family. Indeed, to this day, the credo “Women’s rights are human rights” remains a vital rallying cry.
Few contemporaries had more influence in busting gender norms. Or recalibrating women’s personal style and comportment. Or navigating the dynamics of sex and social interaction. In all of the discussions and interviews I’ve conducted for this book, with dozens of women, Madonna’s is the name that has emerged more frequently than any other as a personal inspiration or as a catalyst for changing the way American women in the ’90s were perceived by society—and how they perceived themselves.
In a broader context, Madonna Louise Ciccone was a master of celebrity longevity through protean reinvention. She was the tastemaker who shape-shifted in response to (and in anticipation of) the ebbs and flows in the tastes of the times. Indulge me a bit of a recap.
Madonna was the one, in the 1980s, who’d helped popularize the crucifix and rosary beads as fashion accessories, undergarments as outerwear, and the navel and the shaggy pit as bad-girl monograms. She’d donned matrimonial white to open the virginity conversation8 and vowed “I’m keeping my baby” to address teen pregnancy (in the song “Papa Don’t Preach”). In concert she sported torpedo-shaped breastplates to assert her alpha femme. In one music video she wore a neck manacle; in another, she kissed a black Jesus figure as crosses flickered in flame.
At every turn, the ruling class shuddered, which only increased Madonna’s hold on the hoi polloi. Her lyrics rankled parents and legislators. Catholic groups in Italy called for a boycott of her performances. Even MTV, which prided itself on ’80s edge, banned her video for “Justify My Love,” a peep-and-drag show of sado-teasing and bi-curious couplings. (Camille Paglia praised the clip as a “truly avant-garde [work that succeeded in] restoring lesbian eroticism to the continuum of heterosexual response.”) In Alek Keshishian’s 1991 warts-and-all documentary, Truth or Dare, Madonna gave head to a bottle of H2O. And her then partner, Warren Beatty, would say of her as the tape rolled, “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk.… Why would you say something if it’s off camera? What point is there of existing?”
She was also a force of nature—and stature—in the entertainment industry. In 1990, Forbes would name Madonna “America’s smartest businesswoman,” well before she started Maverick, her own boutique talent incubator under the Time Warner umbrella. She certainly acted the part. Taking to the stage on one tour in a pair of businessman’s slacks—and a bustier—she “looks out at the crowd of 35,000 fans,” as Forbes put it, “grabs her crotch, raises her fist, and yells, ‘I’m the boss around here.’”
Her most risky venture of all came in 1992. That was the year Madonna published an opulent book of pornographic photos and erotic musings called Sex. Published in five languages, it would sell out every last copy—all five hundred thousand in the United States and more than a million more globally. Throughout the volume, Madonna portrays a character named Mistress Dita, who gamely play-acts (along with models, celebrity friends, and social swells) for fashion photographer Steven Meisel. In the pictures she is being eaten out by a succession of partners. She nibbles some man ass. She portrays lynxes and Lolitas as well as porn princesses straight out of stroke books and bondage films (replete with SS garb). Sex contains scenes of gang assault, mock bestiality, and domination. There is also a good deal of humor: Madonna in her birthday suit, hitchhiking; a live-action porn comic; liquid streams (fountains, sun-lotion eruptions) that appear as a running joke.
In the end, however, the joke was on her. Major critics blanched at the book’s pretensions. The New York Times’ Vicki Goldberg, for one, found the words wanting (“when it comes to writing, she makes a good plumber”) and the pictures a corny sort of porn: “either too artificial or what would be too ordinary if… such extravagant effort had not been made to achieve high-class calendar art.” Michiko Kakutani, also in the Times, called the book’s imagery “secondhand, borrowed from the work of Robert Mapplethorpe… Calvin Klein’s annoying Obsession ads and self-important S&M movies like The Night Porter.” In fact, two of Mapplethorpe’s friends—critic Ingrid Sischy and Howard Read, director of the photography department at Mapplethorpe’s dealer, the Robert Miller Gallery—would tell me of their dismay for how the physical book, stamped with an “(X)” on the jacket and tucked away in a heat-sealed Mylar sack, seemed a commodified echo of Mapplethorpe’s breakthrough portfolios from the ’70s and ’80s (labeled “X,” “Y,” and “Z,” and shrouded in discreet cases).9
Even so, Madonna was venturing into new and crucial terrain. Sex was a mongrel mating of erotica and fame, and it amounted to a celebrity endorsement of the porn turn. Here was a star’s inoculation against overexposure: complete exposure. The culture’s Mistress of Persona, in effect, was breaking down the last barrier between one’s public personality and one’s private—if fantasized—sex life, and she was doing it with her own body as her canvas. (What’s more, she was doing it under the imprint of Warner Books, a mainstream publisher that was part of Time Warner, a massive, publicly traded company.) Madonna was boldly updating Warhol: In the future, she was predicting, everyone will open the kimono for fifteen minutes.
Be that as it may, let’s put aside the dancer-singer-actress-fashionista-entrepreneur-provocateur’s transfigurations: punk to siren, material girl to spiritualist, hellion to mom, vamp to pornographer. Madonna’s real-world impact had little to do with self-promotion or brand enhancement. More meaningful were the three principles of conduct that Madonna seemed to be espousing in the ’80s and ’90s, principles that, when articulated today, might seem tame.
First, she taught women, men, and those across the gender spectrum to disregard taboos and to explore and express their sexual selves. In songs like “Express Yourself,” the singer was advocating a kind of polymorphous pride, which espoused that only you should define your sexual self—your gender identity and expression, your relationship choices, your manner, your masks, your sex appeal—independent of the biases or mores of other individuals or society at large. The Truth or Dare documentary, for instance, was ahead of its time in showing out-and-proud dancers in her retinue being sexually expressive for the camera. In one particularly steamy scene, two men French kiss during a round of “Truth or Dare”; the exchange, according to journalist Jim Farber, reviewing a 2016 film (about the documentary and the 1990 Blond Ambition tour),10 was “an extremely rare sight for a mainstream movie at the time. For a generation of gay people, it was a transformative moment.… In large part, [Truth or Dare] was about revealing truths to erase shame—specifically about being gay or H.I.V.-positive at a time when AIDS paranoia ran rampant.”
Second, Madonna encouraged women to preempt their victimization by confiscating the language of oppression—along with words, behaviors, and outward displays—as their own. (One of her companies, for example, was named Slutco; another, Boy Toy Inc.) As Madonna would tell Norman Mailer in a 1994 interview for Esquire, “Feminists were beating the fuck out of me: ‘What are you doing? You’re sending out all the wrong messages to young girls. They should be using their heads, not their tits and their asses.’ My whole thing is you use all you have, all you have, your sexuality, your femininity, your—any testosterone you have inside of you, your intellect—use whatever you have.” She was, as essayist Emily Nussbaum put it, “our sacrificial anti-victim.”
Third, Madonna reinforced the American virtues of self-reliance, of self-definition, and finally, of finding one’s own path even as one strove to live in a culture promoting social equality. Hers was an ethos of restless independence. Her lyrics, videos, and actions were a club-kid-turned-pop-diva’s version of sentiments expressed by Austen and Brontë and Woolf, of figures as disparate as Mae West and Angela Davis.11
And so it goes. Thirty years after the star’s debut, the producer-musician Diplo would conclude, “No one stands this long. All the women start with Madonna. No matter where you come from, no matter what you’re doing now—if you’re a powerful woman, the genesis is Madonna.”
All these years later, it’s hard to imagine the tumult. But in 1997, America went a little bananas when Ellen DeGeneres, star of the sitcom Ellen, appeared on the cover of Time alongside the headline—stilted even back in the day—“Yep, I’m Gay.”
For a while, the actress’s sexual orientation had been something of an open secret. A few weeks before Time’s issue hit newsstands, she’d appeared in press photos taken at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, clearly bonding with actress Anne Heche, whom she’d met that night. And DeGeneres’s real-life situation mirrored an on-air plot development on Ellen, the series: her TV alter ego, Ellen Morgan (as the magazine put it), was set to “discover that she—the character, that is—is a lesbian.12 For DeGeneres, 39, the decision was the culmination of a long process of struggling with feelings about her own sexuality, her fears about being rejected for it, her wish to lead a more honest and open life in public, her weariness at the effort it took her not to [come out].”
Here was TV’s first openly gay big-name star playing an openly gay lead character, and doing it on ABC, part of the family-friendly Disney company. As a consequence, her very personal disclosure was an inspiration to many of the forty-two million viewers who would watch the episode.
“There was some commercial calculation in it,” says Bruce Handy, who wrote Time’s cover story twenty years ago. “Coming out as gay in her real life/professional life just as her character [did], brought her a lot of attention.… But what she did was brave. There were risks. There was no way of knowing in advance that it would turn out so well. True, the show got cancelled a year later, but she’s since been one of the great hosts of the Oscars telecast, and she’s an extremely successful talk-show host [which capitalizes] on her gift, which is in being herself. Coming out allowed her to do that.”
DeGeneres was up against a still-resistant society. Many Americans had little experience in addressing sexual orientation in a substantive manner. Many inside and outside that conversation had trepidations about confronting their own biases or conflicts. Anti-LGBT discrimination and prejudice remained widespread; the Reverend Jerry Falwell would call her “Ellen DeGenerate.” And as antibias gains were made, incidents of assault often rose.
For many viewers, the newly uncloseted Ellen (and the program’s exploration of themes related to her character’s sexual orientation) went a bit overboard. Yet DeGeneres herself would upbraid those who criticized the show as “too gay.” “Everybody’s saying, ‘O.K., enough already,’” she remarked. “If it was enough already, we wouldn’t have the crime that we have—the hate crimes. We wouldn’t have the suicides. We wouldn’t have… gay-bashing. It’s not enough already. It’s not nearly enough.”
Ellen/Ellen’s magic moment was part of what some would downplay as the pinnacle of “lesbian chic,” an attempt to glamorize women the culture had stereotyped.13 Yet lesbian chic, to some, was just another male- or hetero-affixed baggage tag. Writer Kara Swisher would complain that “even with the welcome warmth of the spotlight, lesbians shouldn’t allow anyone to exploit them for their trendiness.” Even more cynically, another kind of trend had been set in motion. As Alyssa Rosenberg would later insist in the Atlantic, DeGeneres’s orchestrated rollout became the template for how public figures proclaimed their orientation—in TV sitdowns, in the popular press, and on social media. It was yet another card to play in firmly establishing one’s franchise. “Coming out remains a fraught process for many Americans,” Rosenberg would write. “But for some famous, secure people, official confirmation of their sexual orientation isn’t just a matter of honesty: It’s a highly valuable commodity. The coming-out process has become yet another celebrity experience to be packaged up for consumption.”
And yet in 1997, Ellen DeGeneres’s reveal had broad impact. As more and more straight people accepted gay and lesbian friends, family members, and coworkers; as the marriage-equality movement made greater strides; as formerly hesitant or insular Americans made everyday acquaintance with what would come to be called the LGBT community, the wider culture was moving light-years beyond “Yep.”
Demi Moore, the screen star with the ice-queen demeanor and a striking coltish quality, was the quintessential ’90s movie star. And like her contemporary Michael Douglas, she excelled at portraying characters who forcefully challenged assumptions about society’s codified sex roles.14
Her greatest role of all, however, would come in front of a still camera. In 1991, Moore was scheduled to be the subject of a Vanity Fair cover story. There was one problem, though. How would photographer Annie Leibovitz depict the actress—seven months pregnant at the time—in a way that made her presentable (the word sounds obsolete today) on the front of a commercial magazine?
The photographer and her subject were already comfortable with each other. When Moore married Bruce Willis, Leibovitz had shot their wedding photos. When Moore was carrying the couple’s first child, Leibovitz had agreed to take some private nudes. For the Vanity Fair session, things started off slowly. Moore posed seminude, draped in a green silk robe. At another point, she put on a black lace bra. “Toward the end of the shoot,” as Leibovitz would recall in her book Annie Leibovitz at Work, Moore dispensed with clothing altogether. “The fully nude picture… was intended just for Demi. I was taking some companion photographs to the ones I had made during Demi’s first pregnancy. As I was shooting, I said, ‘You know, this would be a great cover.’”
What Leibovitz saw through her lens was the most arresting film actress of the day wearing nothing but a pair of diamond earrings and a thirty-carat diamond ring. In the resulting photo, Moore discreetly shrouded her breasts and held her protruding belly. Her posture—upright, forthright, head tilted slightly upward—was statuesque, iconic. Her full figure, her openness, her natural beauty referenced Rubens and Titian, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and sculptor Jacob Epstein’s Genesis. And when it appeared on the August cover of Vanity Fair it set off cultural shock waves.
As I have recounted elsewhere, certain newsstands sold out the day it was published. Many convenience stores and grocery chains banned the issue from their shelves. In much of America, retail outlets and distributors would carry copies only if they were shrouded in a white paper wrapper. Conservative commentators railed about the fact that an expectant mother was expressing herself as an unapologetically sexual creature. Interview magazine, meanwhile, would compare the cover’s “cross-cultural recognition and infamy” with the power of “a hit movie.”
The cover’s immediate impact, in the period before the prevalence of the World Wide Web, was measured in its echoes across the print press: fifteen hundred newspaper articles mentioned the photo; twelve major cartoonists lampooned it; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution conducted a poll gauging public reaction and noted that “5,000 responded, with opinion dividing right down the middle.” Vanity Fair received a similar mix of mail, pro and con, the most thoughtful perhaps coming from Shannon Marmion of Plano, Texas, who commented, “Is America really this messed up? Have we actually come to a point where exploitative magazines full of naked women are displayed openly at newsstands while sensitive pictures of pregnant women are banned or covered up so as not to offend anyone?”
Leibovitz and Moore, in fact, had created something lasting. Their “Madonna with Child” reprised a theme that sculptures, paintings, and totemic figures had conveyed for millennia: the primal link between fertility and sensual power. “I thought about how people in this country don’t want to embrace motherhood and sensuality,” Demi Moore would later comment. “While you’re pregnant you’re made to feel not beautiful or sexually viable. You’re either sexy or you’re a mother. I didn’t want to have to choose, so I challenged that.”15 Elsewhere she would remark that the photo was a “feminist statement.… People were moved by something I did that was very natural to me, and that in the process I could have done something to make women look at themselves differently.”
Fashion experts would credit the picture with having started the trend of snug-fitting maternity clothes that accentuate curves instead of hiding them. To many women, the cover helped destigmatize appearing pregnant. As odd as it sounds, what had sometimes amounted to a nine-month “predicament”—in the male-dominated workplace or in youth-oriented popular culture—was becoming, more to the point, a point of pride.
The framework, thanks to Moore and to Leibovitz, had expanded for depicting and understanding mothers-to-be. And millions of Americans would readily acknowledge that a childbearing woman inherently embodies the promise of new life, certainly, but also sensual allure and the irrefutable power of creation.
Anita Hill grew up on a working farm in Lone Tree, Oklahoma. The youngest of thirteen children, she was raised in the Baptist faith. “Every other week I attended our local Baptist church, and Sunday school every Sunday,” says Hill, a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis (in one of our two long interviews in Newton, Massachusetts). “It was a rural church, exclusive to African Americans. Women sat on one side with the children; men on the other. Female deacons were not allowed and still aren’t. My mother’s father helped found the church.” Her farming parents instilled in their children the virtues not only of a spiritual grounding but also of a good education. In high school, Anita—studious, popular, and active in Future Homemakers of America—would become her class valedictorian before going off to Oklahoma State University, then Yale Law.
Faith, like the law, would continue to be a strong component in her life. (She would join the Presbyterian Church in 1992.) But contrary to her public image as a prim, sober sort, she is in fact a shrewd woman of the world; active in the legal, academic, and women’s rights communities; possessed of a sparkling and sometimes withering wit. She has maintained a longtime relationship with a male partner. She enjoys the occasional dry martini.
And yet never in her life, before or since, would she be compelled to take on as public a role as she did in October 1991.
It all began three months earlier. To fill the vacancy of the retiring Thurgood Marshall, President George H. W. Bush had designated Clarence Thomas as his new Supreme Court designee. The nomination, though sure to receive strong resistance from many Democrats because of Thomas’s far-right views and rulings, nevertheless seemed a fairly safe bet. He was a conservative serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and, like Marshall, a black jurist. He had served under Ronald Reagan and—en route to securing his federal judgeship on President Bush’s watch—had developed relationships with powerful congressmen and prominent Washington conservatives.16 Moreover, right-wing strategists had mobilized to avoid a repeat of the contentious 1987 hearings at which Democrats had scuttled the confirmation of Robert Bork, Reagan’s archconservative pick for a Court vacancy. Justice Thomas, all in all, seemed to have the wind at his back, his bid championed by savvy negotiators on the Bush-Quayle team and by lobbyists who moved in to tamp down opposition. He even felt reassured by the Senate Judiciary chairman, Joe Biden, who’d reportedly told him, “I’m in your court.”
But accusations soon surfaced. A decade before, so the rumors went, Thomas, while a government appointee, had made sexually charged statements to one or more people, including an employee who was reporting directly to him—charges he would categorically deny. That person turned out to be Anita Hill.
Hill had been Thomas’s assistant when he was head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. She would continue working for him when he was asked to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—the federal agency tasked, among its other roles, with processing claims arising from accusations of workplace harassment. At the time, Hill chose not to air her grievances about Thomas’s alleged behavior. While she could have done so, such complaints were not at all common—which was part of the problem. What’s more, as a woman with a rising career, she had not wanted to alienate her politically connected boss.
Eventually, Hill switched jobs. She says she felt the need to escape what she would come to characterize as a hostile working environment. For all that, however, she stayed in touch with Thomas professionally over the years, once asking him to write her a letter of recommendation.
The incidents, she claims, had plagued and puzzled her. At the time of the encounters, she sought others’ confidence and discussed the details—and her distress—with three of her colleagues. And while meeting with an American University faculty member, who was encouraging her to apply for a prospective position as a visiting professor, she was asked why she’d left the EEOC. She decided to confide in him as well. (That law professor, Joel Paul, happens to have been a friend and college classmate of mine.)
Hill, for the most part, had made a decision to remain silent; what was past was past. But then, in the late summer of 1991, a Senate aide looking into Thomas’s history phoned Hill and asked about a purported pattern of behavior by the judge. She declined to answer, she now says, describing the initial inquiry as “very general—something like, ‘Did I know anything about rumors that Thomas had harassed women who worked for him?’” Even so, she encouraged the caller to have the committee investigate further. By her way of thinking, according to Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in their book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, Hill “‘feared’ that unless other women came forward with similar accounts, her description of Thomas’s outlandish behavior would be dismissed as ‘an isolated incident by someone who had recently been divorced.’” (Thomas and his first wife divorced in 1984; Hill has never married.) Accusations of workplace sexual harassment at the time were relatively rare.
Her fears were justified. If she were to come out with her charges, she realized, she would have to dredge up long-ago incidents that were embarrassing, shameful, and personal. She would be navigating new legal and social terrain, without fixed guidelines. She would be putting Thomas’s career on the line, as well as her own, risking her privacy and reputation.
For three weeks, Senate aides continued to probe into the matter, and, Hill says, their questions became more pointed—as did the pressure to go public. Finally, in late September she agreed to cooperate and describe her experiences to an FBI agent, she recalls, “but only if I could put in the record a statement in my own words about what happened with Thomas along with [the mandatory] FBI report.” The next step was inevitable. The Senate committee announced that its hearings would be expanded to include testimony from both the nominee, Thomas, and his accusers: Hill, along with four “witnesses” (Joel Paul and the three others who were willing to discuss Hill’s past disclosures to them about Thomas). Her appearance was scheduled for October 11, 1991.
It was hard to believe, as many would contend, that Anita Hill was politically motivated. She had told others, for instance, that she objected to the treatment of Robert Bork—one of her former teachers at Yale—who had been one of the most conservative modern-era judges proposed to serve on the Court. Indeed, as Paul would state under oath, “I know from numerous conversations with her that she served faithfully in the Reagan administration, that she was generally in sync with the goals of that administration.”
Hill’s rationale, instead, was straightforward, she now says: “What I thought I was doing was to give testimony that was relevant to the proceeding at hand that went to the behavior of a person who was going to be put on the Supreme Court for life. And it went specifically to how he had comported himself in the workplace with regard to rules that he was in charge of enforcing.
“At the time,” Hill continues, “I might have been seen as embodying a liberal cause. Over time—even now—it came to be, to some, an embodiment of ‘conservative values.’ You become the embodiment of whatever people project onto you.… I was never there to embody a cause.”
On the first day of her testimony, Anita Hill appeared in a conservative blue-green skirt suit, speaking courteously, softly, forcefully. She sat before an all-male, all-white panel of senators, before TV cameras, before a national audience estimated at thirty million. She was addressed throughout the proceedings as Professor Hill.
She would assert that while she worked for Thomas at the Department of Education, he had asked her out on dates and she had refused, believing, as she told the committee, “that having a social relationship with a person who was supervising my work would be ill-advised.” After a time, she said, Thomas would call her into his office to discuss work matters, then speak graphically about sexual topics. “His conversations were very vivid,” she stated. “He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts.… Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about those subjects.”
Once Thomas and Hill began working at the EEOC, she claimed, Thomas would comment about the outfits she wore. “One of the oddest episodes I remember,” she added, “was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office. He got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can, and asked, ‘Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?’ On other occasions he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal.”
She went on to allege that he once referred to the penis size of a particular porn-film actor. When committee chair Joe Biden pressed her on specifics—“Do you recall what it was?”—she responded, “The name that was referred to was Long Dong Silver.” This methodical chronicle of adult movies, sex acts, and body parts in the halls of Congress seemed to many to have turned the hearings, in the words of Judge Thomas, into “a circus.”17 Indeed, he would bluntly tell the committee that the accusations played “to the worst stereotypes we have about black men in this country.”
When Thomas, in turn, took his seat before the lawmakers, he dismissed Hill’s charges in their entirety. He also questioned how the behavior and motives of the committee and the press could have allowed such an important process to devolve into farce and spectacle. “I have endured this ordeal for 103 days,” he said. “Reporters sneaking into my garage to examine books I read. Reporters and interest groups swarming over divorce papers, looking for dirt.… This is not American. This is Kafkaesque. It has got to stop.… I am not here to be further humiliated by this committee, or anyone else, or to put my private life on display for a prurient interest or other reasons.”
He would go on to say, “As far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.… I will not provide the rope for my own lynching or for further humiliation. I am not going to engage in discussions, nor will I submit to roving questions of what goes on in the most intimate parts of my private [life] or the sanctity of my bedroom.”
Thomas also spoke of the psychic costs. “I have never, in all my life, felt such hurt, such pain, such agony. My family and I have been done a grave and irreparable injustice.… I have been racking my brains and eating my insides out trying to think of what I could have said or done to Anita Hill to lead her to allege [these charges].… This is a person I have helped at every turn in the road since we met. She seemed to appreciate the continued cordial relationship we had since day one. She sought my advice and counsel.”
Several lawmakers could barely conceal their contempt for Hill’s imputations. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, wondered aloud if Hill had purloined her charges from printed sources. He cited an Oklahoma lawsuit that mentioned Long Dong Silver, implying that Hill could have lifted the reference from an old legal case. He held up a copy of the horror novel The Exorcist, then read a passage that might have inspired Hill, in which a character reportedly spoke of “an alien pubic hair floating around in my gin.” Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina would declare, “I do not believe Judge Thomas is capable of the kind of behavior Professor Hill described.”18
Wyoming’s Alan Simpson—who had put through his own legislation to combat sexual harassment—would say ominously, “I really am getting stuff over the transom about Professor Hill. I have got letters hanging out of my pockets. I have got faxes… statements from people that know her, statements from Tulsa, Oklahoma, saying, ‘Watch out for this woman.’ But nobody has the guts to say that because it gets all tangled up in this sexual harassment crap.… Mr. Chairman, you know all of us have been through this stuff in life, but never to this degree.… This is all Shakespeare. This is about love and hate, and cheating and distrust.… What a tragedy. What a disgusting tragedy.”
Hill still bristles about the outburst: “With Alan Simpson it was, ‘People are saying, “Watch out for this woman.”’ [He was implying] that I was some kind of threat to all of them: You are a threat not only to Clarence Thomas—you are a threat to America. And [Senator Arlen] Specter accused me of flat-out perjury.”
Meanwhile, some of those on the Judiciary Committee who might have been Hill’s ardent supporters were themselves hamstrung. Senator Edward Kennedy, she recalls, “couldn’t help. He was hardly a person in a position to shed light on what appropriate behavior was.… He had his own indiscretions and episodes of bad behavior. He was neutralized. Some of the other things that could have compromised the other senators were not as obvious. The behavior that was documented shortly thereafter [involving sexual misconduct accusations against Republican senator] Bob Packwood was well known to the other senators. The ‘page scandals’ were part of Senate history.
“Those things were in the air. [The committee members] either had to know or they chose not to. So at the time, I thought, ‘How dare you say, “I must not be telling the truth—I had to be inventing it,”’ if there was so much like this in their world. They could shield their eyes from it and pretend it didn’t happen when it suited them politically.”
To top it off, Chairman Biden, for reasons that remain unclear, decided not to call for the testimony of several additional people who might have backed up Hill’s version of events (or might have called Thomas’s into question). It was a decision that some considered a procedural blunder—one that could have very well swayed the outcome. As Hill would say on the twentieth anniversary of the hearings, “Everybody has to take responsibility for what he did during that time, including Joe Biden, who should have called the witnesses.”
In the end, Thomas was confirmed by a narrow Senate vote: 52 to 48. And much of the country had found Thomas to be the more credible presence in the harsh glare of the TV lights. “After the hearings, when people were polled,” Hill recalls, “six out of ten people did not believe me.”
Hill, however, saw a silver lining. “The fact that I was able to get up there and say [what I said] was a triumph,” she insists. “I was able to tell the truth of what happened in the face of all those people trying to completely silence me. I could not have done it without the four people on that panel—corroborating witnesses—people I’d told years before the nomination. But what people don’t know is that they volunteered. They came on their own. They called the committees or called me after this whole thing erupted in the press.”
And what of Hill’s reputation? It continued to suffer blow after blow. Thomas’s wife, Virginia, would put it this way, in People magazine that November: “What’s scary about her allegations is that they remind me of the movie Fatal Attraction or, in her case, what I call the fatal assistant. In my heart, I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted.”19 Soon thereafter, journalist David Brock would construct a damaging story in the American Spectator impugning Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” He would then expand it into a 438-page “character assassination”—his own characterization—in a 1993 book called The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story, which sought to help exonerate Thomas by undermining Hill and her testimony. And yet a decade later, Brock would recant many of the facts, indeed the foundation of his case against Hill, in his 2002 memoir Blinded by the Right. “I was a liar and a fraud in a dubious cause,” he wrote. “I had missed significant evidence that showed that Hill’s testimony was more truthful than Thomas’s flat denials.” Even after admitting to himself the error of his ways (“my version of the Thomas-Hill controversy was wrong”), Brock would go on with his smear campaign—in his words, “continu[ing] to malign Anita Hill and her liberal supporters as liars.”
Hill would gain a measure of rehabilitation with the publication of Mayer and Abramson’s Strange Justice. In their book, the authors interviewed witnesses who were prepared to testify but had never been called to do so, along with other women who claimed to have been sexually harassed by Thomas. The authors also unearthed people who had known Thomas and could recall what they considered to be his porn habit. The authors tracked down the owner of a video rental parlor in Washington who disclosed that “Clarence Thomas was a regular customer of adult movies.” There was no crime in this, of course. But the recollections ran counter to the image of probity that Thomas conveyed at the hearings. And a report that Thomas had rented such materials as late as 1989, wrote Mayer and Abramson, made it “all the more difficult to dismiss tales of his earlier interest in pornography as a youthful indiscretion.”
What of Hill’s legacy over time? It was, inarguably, irreversible. By shining a light on the untenable work environments that many Americans found all too familiar—and by standing up as a woman, a person of color, and a legal scholar who dared to speak truth to power in the corridors of the white male establishment—she would help breathe a new kind of energy into the women’s movement. In the year after her Senate testimony, the EEOC saw a twofold rise in the number of women filing on-the-job harassment grievances. Aided in part by Hill’s public disclosures, the coffers began to swell at EMILY’s List, a group that backed the candidacies of female pro-choice Democrats. And by the fall of 1992, in what many would call the “Anita Hill Class,” twenty-eight new female members were voted into Congress, an unprecedented number.20 Even committee member Arlen Specter, who came close to losing his seat in the 1992 election partly due to his tough grilling of Hill, would eventually reflect, “Professor Hill produced the year of women in the Senate. That proceeding was a real lesson to me. I heard from so many women who saw themselves in her place, who felt their veracity was being questioned along with hers.”
What has come to matter most to Hill are the tales of strangers who approached her to explain how her courage had helped embolden them. “The best thing that happened,” she says, were “the stories. Women sat down and talked for the first time with their mothers, their daughters about their own incidents of sexual harassment. They’d never filed a complaint. They had never discussed this with people they were closest to.” It continues to this day. “A few months ago on the street here, in [nearby] Waltham,” Hill attests, “a woman came up and told me she got involved in the priest sex abuse movement locally and she was employed by the diocese. She said the hearings had been one of the inspirations for her finally coming forward and divulging what she knew.”
The ironies were rich. Clarence Thomas, the man in charge of the EEOC—the arm of government that oversaw compliance with laws protecting American workers’ civil rights—had himself been accused of on-the-job sexual harassment. And six years later, the same man would join the unanimous Supreme Court ruling that would permit the Paula Jones case to move forward, a lawsuit that ostensibly hinged on the principle of workplace harassment.
Professor Hill addresses the power dynamic in another office relationship that became politically charged that decade: that of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. “She was an intern—there was a big age [and authority] difference,” Hill concludes. “So the idea of ‘consensual,’ to me, is a misnomer here. The second problem I have is the whole affair does contribute to the devaluing of young women in the workplace, whether at the White House or anywhere else. What if your daughter doesn’t want to engage in sexual relations with the president? What is the message to that young woman? The message coming out was: being intimately involved with the president? That’s what she should want. There wasn’t a counter[argument] to that.”
Anita Hill’s impact ultimately was profound. She would alter the way Americans interact at the office, the way bosses treat employees, the way workers file grievances, the way we respect coworkers, consciously and unconsciously. Sexual harassment, she tells me, “is partly about men and women, but it’s also about the powerful over the less powerful.” She shares a private letter she received from a Pasadena woman, one of many she has treasured for nearly three decades:
That day you gave testimony, I was home waiting to go to work. As I watched, tears started rising behind my eyes.… I was remembering my own feelings at fourteen when the principal (in whose office I worked at school) kept asking me what I did with my boyfriends.… When I got to work there were four women talking at the sign-in sheet. They were exhilarated. “This’ll change everything.” “It’s finally been said.” I joined in, thrilled that I wasn’t alone. Several of us hugged. There were no questions. We were just swimming in the same water.