When Everything Changed (48 page)

“W
E WANTED A PLEASANT OCCASION
.”

Sexual harassment in the workplace seems to have been around since the first female clerical worker.
More than a century
ago,
Typewriter Trade Journal
reported worriedly that employers were using “peculiar language” when advertising for a secretary—language like “a pretty blonde.” Women who worked were always aware of the problem, but if the broader public thought about it at all, it was only in the classic terms of a boss threatening to fire a female employee unless she had sex with him. That changed in 1991, when Clarence Thomas, a nominee to the Supreme Court, was accused of tormenting a female subordinate with requests for dates and talk about pornography.

Anita Hill, a graduate of Yale Law School, had been only 25 when Thomas hired her as his chief aide in the Reagan administration’s Department of Education.
A native of Oklahoma
, she was the youngest of thirteen children in a hardworking farm family so averse to scenes and confrontation that when Anita became the center of the biggest political controversy of the era, no one mentioned the matter when she returned home for Thanksgiving. (“We wanted a pleasant occasion,” one of her relatives explained.) Hill had worked under Thomas in two federal agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which, ironically, handled sexual harassment complaints, albeit without much enthusiasm. (
Time
reported that although complaints
of sexual harassment to the EEOC had risen 70 percent between 1981 and 1989, most were dismissed without even being investigated.)

Hill said that after she agreed to follow Thomas to the EEOC, his behavior changed for the worse, that he claimed someone had “put pubic hair on my Coke” and began to talk very specifically about pornographic movies he had been watching, about “women having sex with animals and films involving group sex or rape scenes.” When she was offered a job teaching law at Oral Roberts University, Hill accepted quickly, even though the law school was verging on losing its accreditation.

Nevertheless, Hill kept in contact with Thomas, and he may have been as stunned as the rest of the country when she eventually sent a statement describing his behavior to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Of course, it created a sensation. When she appeared to testify, Hill was called a liar, a lesbian, and sexually repressed.
Changing planes in Houston
on her way home, she was surrounded by hecklers yelling, “Shame! Shame!” A divided Senate approved the nomination 52 to 48, by far the narrowest margin ever for a Supreme Court confirmation. The White House swore in the new justice nine days ahead of schedule, out of fear that some other revelation would derail the installation.
A poll found that 55
percent of men thought Thomas was more believable, and 49 percent of women.

But as time went on and the debate continued, voters—particularly women voters—became more likely to say they believed Hill. Perhaps that was because so many other tales followed. One involved Tailhook, an annual gathering of navy and marine corps officers that had always featured mass drunkenness and boorish behavior. In 1991 in Las Vegas, the male officers’ conduct was particularly shocking. Lieutenant Paula Coughlin told reporters from
60 Minutes
that she had been caught in a gauntlet of drunken officers who pawed her, tossed her from man to man, and put her in fear of being raped. The navy made things worse by trying to cover up the complaints.
A Pentagon report
found that at one point the commander of the Naval Investigative Service, Rear Admiral Duvall Williams Jr., had “a screaming match” with a female officer in which he compared women pilots to “go-go dancers, topless dancers, or hookers.” He also said, citing Coughlin’s language, that “any woman that would use the F-word on a regular basis would welcome this type of activity.”

And then, of course, in 1998, the beginning of the Clinton impeachment crisis over the Monica Lewinsky affair told Americans far more about the way employers could behave with female underlings than they wanted to know. Although Lewinsky was a willing participant, the president was very, very obviously more powerful than the humble intern, and some feminists claimed that along with his other offenses, he was guilty of sexual harassment. Others disagreed. The “
commonsense guideline
in sexual behavior that came out of the women’s movement,” Gloria Steinem wrote, was that “no means no and yes means yes.” She argued that the case was not comparable to Clarence Thomas’s, or cause for impeachment. But, she added, the allegations against Clinton might suggest the president was “a candidate for sex addiction therapy.”

A side product of the Thomas episode was an increased interest in electing women to Congress. Their numbers had been creeping up very slowly through the ’80s, but watching the Senate Judiciary Committee debate sexual harassment, people found it hard to ignore the fact that all those doing the arguing were men. Patty Murray, a state senator in Washington, decided to become part of the solution and won a Senate seat for herself by running as a typical “mom in tennis shoes.” Barbara Boxer of California, who had been part of a delegation of Democratic women from the House of Representatives who had marched to the Senate to urge that Hill’s testimony be given more credence, won a Senate race as well. The 1992 elections raised the number of women in the House from twenty-eight to forty-seven and put six women in the Senate, creating the legend of the Year of the Woman. While reaction to the Thomas case might have had an impact, women candidates benefited much more from the reapportionment of congressional districts that took place before the election, creating more places where nonincumbents had a chance to win.
Senator Barbara Mikulski, for one
, hated the whole Year-of-the-Woman idea. It sounded, she thought, “like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, not a fancy or a year.”

“A
N OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD OF GOING TO WAR
.”

The suffragists might have imagined that women would someday have a significant presence in Congress, but chances are very few thought they would also become a critical part of the armed services. The military had traditionally welcomed women’s participation only in times of crisis, and even then in very limited roles. Although Congress made women a permanent part of the armed forces after World War II, the number of female recruits was kept small. Besides being barred from combat, they were not supposed to serve on ships, and they could be discharged for getting married, getting pregnant, or having an abortion. The idea that the nation would come to depend on women in uniform did not really occur until after the war in Vietnam, when the military’s prestige was low, its leadership was in disarray, and the new volunteer army was finding it almost impossible to fill its ranks. Women who were willing to sign up had more education and tended to be better motivated than male volunteers.

In New Mexico, Sylvia Acevedo had dreamed of following her older brother to West Point when she graduated from high school in 1975. But she discovered that “it was against the law for me. It wasn’t ‘No, you can’t come.’ I couldn’t even apply.” She was a year too early. The armed forces’ increasing needs, combined with political pressure from the women’s movement, forced the military academies to go coed in 1976, to the howls of the old guard.
“Maybe you could find
one woman in ten thousand who could lead in combat, but she would be a freak and we’re not running the military for freaks,” said General William Westmoreland. Women were still barred from “combat-related” jobs—a rule that was as big a constraint on advancement as the rules against overtime and lifting heavy objects had been on women in the private sector. Combat-related assignments involved more than firing guns at the enemy; they included everything from flying jets to support services. In fact, they counted for 73 percent of all possible military occupations in 1980. The military gradually relaxed the rules and ignored some of the ones that still existed. And once American troops began fighting in Iraq, the line between combat and noncombat roles virtually vanished.

By the first Gulf War in 1991, 7 percent of the people deployed to Iraq were women, and besides tending the sick, they flew helicopters, delivered supplies to the front units, and filled other jobs that put them in the line of fire. Twelve women were killed, and two were taken prisoner.
In the most famous
incident, a Black Hawk helicopter carrying Rhonda Cornum, a 36-year-old flight surgeon, was shot down behind Iraqi lines. Most of the other soldiers in the helicopter were killed in the crash. Cornum had a bullet in her back, two broken arms, and a shattered knee when the Iraqis found her. Her arms, she wrote later, “were swinging uselessly beside me like sticks tied to my shoulders with string.” She was tied up and put into a truck, and as it was driven off, one of the Iraqis unzipped Cornum’s flight suit and began to molest her. “I remember thinking, ‘Hey, you could do better than this,’ ” she wrote. “I was not only repulsed by his advances, but amazed.” Although the Iraqi kept fondling her breasts, she wrote, “My screams and the fortunate impossibility of getting me out of my flight suit with two broken arms kept the molester at bay” until the truck got to its destination. After she was released, Cornum tried to downplay the story. It was, she said, “an occupational hazard of going to war.”

D
ENA IVEY’S QUEST
to find herself involved a lot of different parts. Born in Alaska to a mother who was part Yupik—a local Eskimo tribe—and part Norwegian, she was told by her father to “tell people you’re Greek or Italian” while her mother “pretty much bombarded us with Norwegian.” She gradually came to embrace her identity as a Native American. She also realized she was gay. But her first romantic relationship was traumatic. “So I joined the military to get the hell away from her,” Ivey recalled. She had dreamed of being an FBI agent. (“
The Silence of the Lambs
had come out at that time. I wanted to be Jodie Foster.”) With that in mind, she enlisted in the air force and trained for the military police.

Most of the other women Ivey met in the air force were heterosexual, “very focused on their husbands and boyfriends,” she recalled. “These were tough gals…. We were all working. We were doing a tough job. I wasn’t trying to convert anybody or anything.” Ivey said she was “paranoid” about letting people know she was gay, and for good reason. The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule could be enforced in an arbitrary and irregular fashion; it did not stop Ivey’s supervisors from asking her about gossip that she had a relationship with another woman. In 2007 Pentagon statistics showed an extremely large proportion of the people discharged for being openly gay were women—46 percent in the army, where women made up 14 percent of the personnel, and 49 percent in the air force, where they made up 20 percent.

While many women resented the no-combat rule as a bar to their full participation in both the opportunities and the responsibilities of military life, Ivey thought some restrictions were a good idea—especially if they kept the sexes separate when soldiers were away from their home base. When her squadron was involved in war games, she fought for the right to keep her team in a different tent from the men’s. “These guys were piggy. They were making all kinds of sexist jokes,” she recalled. In the end, because of her protests, the nine women were indeed separated—and assigned to a leaky six-person tent of their own.

“B
LACK AND WHITE KIDS RIDE TO THE
D
AIRY
Q
UEEN TOGETHER
.”

In 1990 a Fox TV comedy,
True Colors,
showed a black man and his white wife in bed together. That was a little thing, but maybe not quite so little when you considered that in 1968, the white singer Petula Clark made headlines when she unthinkingly touched the arm of Harry Belafonte on her television special. (A representative of the sponsor, who was watching the taping, said his employer’s car sales would be hurt if the shot aired and demanded a retake. Clark complied, then told a technician to erase everything but the original version.)

The idea of sex between a black man and a white woman was the source of unending racist hysteria in the segregated South, and it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry in most Southern states until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that the laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Even in the North, Americans seemed to have a hard time accepting the idea.
It was not until 1991
that Gallup first reported more Americans saying they approved of interracial marriage than disapproved. (The margin was 48 to 42 percent.) That was down from more than 90 percent disapproval in 1958.

If the country needed
a reminder of how fraught the issue still could be, there was Wedowee, Alabama, where in 1994 an unknown arsonist burned down the high school after the principal barred interracial couples from the prom. It was, in a weird way, actually in part a story about change. Alabama had been infamous in its resistance to integration, and it would be the last state to officially wipe its meaningless but symbolic laws against interracial marriage off the books in 2000. But for all that, interracial dating was not uncommon. “Black and white kids ride to the Dairy Queen together, they go to ball games, and most people don’t think anything of it…. The red lights don’t all quit working when an interracial couple drives through town. This is 1994,” said Terry Graham, the mayor of the small town of eight hundred residents. In fact, 17-year-old Revonda Bowen, whose plans to go to the prom with a white date helped spark the crisis, was the child of a marriage between a black woman and a white man.