With a Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearings thrown into chaos by accusations of sexual misconduct, the Brett Kavanaugh drama feels like a familiar spectacle. During Clarence Thomas’s confirmation process, a young lawyer named Anita Hill bravely testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him. She was ritually humiliated by male senators, but famously kept her cool and brought the concept of sexual harassment squarely into the cultural conversation. Now, Christine Blasey Ford has come forward with a story of attempted rape when she and Kavanaugh were teenagers, with a potential Senate hearing in her future. (Thomas and Kavanaugh have denied the allegations.) It’s quite a moment, and quite a test: how far have we come since Hill’s testimony in 1991?
If you had asked me that question last week, I would have said very far indeed. After all, a great many men have recently torpedoed their own careers, seeing real consequences after their bullying, harassment, and assaults came to light. That’s a low bar, but it’s also fairly new—we have long indulged powerful men and allowed them great leeway in mistreating women. Yes, Donald Trump is in office, but he lost the popular vote by millions, and people always hold politicians they like to different standards than those they don’t. And Trump’s election was galvanizing. Without it, I’m not sure we would have seen the #MeToo movement reach the volume that it has. I’m not under the impression we’re living in a feminist paradise, but it does seem that overall, men are held far more accountable for their choices and abuses than they were 27 years ago when Hill testified.
That optimism may have been premature. Kavanaugh defenders are out in full force—Dr. Ford only identified herself because she was already being stalked by reporters, and figured that the negative consequences she sought to avoid with anonymity were looming. And it’s not clear yet whether this accusation, which now has a name and a face behind it, will actually tank Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Ford has requested an F.B.I. probe into her claims before she testifies, which is exactly what happened in the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill made her claims. So far, Republicans are refusing, accusing Democrats of dirty tricks. Sit with that for a second: a credible accusation of attempted rape made against a Supreme Court nominee may not be enough to trigger an F.B.I. investigation to make sure we have all the information possible before proceeding. Allegations of sexual harassment were enough for the F.B.I. to get involved in 1991. Now, it seems, we’ve moved backwards.
Republicans are instead banking on the probability that this will devolve into a “he said, she said,” and we know from experience that the weight of one man’s word is much heavier than a woman’s. In a criminal trial, that would be fair: our justice system demands significant evidence of guilt in order to convict. But this isn’t a criminal trial; it’s a hearing to assess a man’s experience and character before we appoint him, for life, to the highest court in the land.
It’s clear in hindsight—and for feminists, was clear at the time—that Clarence Thomas lacks that kind of character and integrity. American women have paid dearly for that. Thomas has been on the wrong side of so many decisions impacting our lives, from his opposition to safe abortion services to his siding with the majority in a case where more than a million women sued Walmart for gender discrimination in pay and not only lost, but saw the right to file class-action lawsuits gutted—the only vehicle by which many pay-discrimination cases impacting low-wage workers got their day in court. The mistreatment of women in one’s personal and professional life, whether that’s assault or harassment or discrimination, cannot be severed from one’s broader view of the world and women’s roles within it. These are questions the Supreme Court inevitably addresses. They are questions Brett Kavanaugh will address if he is a justice (and questions he already addresses as a circuit court judge). His treatment of women could not be more relevant to his fitness for this position.
But will it matter? In a hyper-partisan environment where there is much to lose—a Supreme Court seat is enormously valuable, which is why Republicans worked so hard to block Obama from filling one—it’s hard to see Kavanaugh supporters backing down. In 1991, Thomas’s appointment after the brutally sexist and racist interrogation of Anita Hill spurred women into action, and in 1992 we elected more new women to the Senate than ever before: four. They joined two sitting female senators, bringing the total number of Senate women up to six.
This year, women are running for office in record numbers. Election watchers suspect that a significant gender gap could emerge in the midterms, and that female turnout may be particularly high if women are as angry and as motivated as we seem. Pushing the Kavanaugh nomination through despite a credible allegation of assault could very well be one more motivator that gets women out to the polls. But we saw this in 1992 as well, and although women’s rage did make a difference electorally, progress toward gender equality has been slower than hoped. Women make up just 23 percent of the Senate today, and even the best-case scenario in the midterms won’t raise that significantly.
We remain far from equality. But these moments matter. Hill’s testimony was groundbreaking, even if it didn’t spark a full feminist revolution. This time around, our senators have a chance to demonstrate that things really have changed since 1991. And if they don’t, then the rest of us—men, too—must make them pay an electoral price so significant they won’t ever again think they can shunt women’s voices aside to clear the way for men ascending to power.
