Anita Hill Roundtable (Frontiers)

UCLA women's law journal, 2019

S. Cal. L. Rev., 1991

1368 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 65:1367 Television added a different dimension to the process, which became a human drama when Professor Anita Hill's sexual harassment claim and Justice Thomas's denial were aired. The nation watched mesmerized, waiting ...

Feminist Media Studies, 2018

Polish Journal of American Studies , 2008

1996

"He Said/She Said: Truth-Telling and #MeToo" analyses how the conversation about sexual violence changed when millions of women worldwide raised their voices to say “Me Too.” It historicizes the #MeToo movement within feminist activism in communities of colour around sexual assault advocacy and in relation to Anita Hill's testimony in 1991 that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. The #MeToo moment offers a clear representation of the scale of sexual violence and presents a vivid example of the power of testimony to conjure a scene of witness through the power of truth-telling. Leigh Gilmore argues that truth-telling is dynamic and that survivor speech in the form of #MeToo has disrupted the routine minimization of women's accounts of harm into the "He said/She said" pattern.

New Political Science, 2007

The triumphs and disappointments of the late 1960s defined an age in which the postwar years morphed into one of the most progressive eras this nation has ever known. The second wave of feminism was new. NOW had only recently been formed in 1966, just on the heels of the publication of Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. By 1968 grass roots feminist organizations had risen from the ranks of labor and socialist activism, anti-war, and anti-racist movements. Feminism was a response to the fact that women and men almost literally inhabited different worlds. Law firms routinely rejected female applicants. Professional schools had quotas stipulating how many women could enter. "Help wanted" ads were organized into columns for males and females, a practice that was legal until 1973. 1 Until the 1963 passage of the Equal Pay Act, it was lawful to organize pay scales by gender. Women could not serve on juries in many states until 1975. 2 Most of the elite universities only admitted men. It was not uncommon for employers to refuse to hire married women, who were also often denied entry to medical and other professional schools. Women hid pregnancies to keep their jobs because, until 1978, it was legal in many places not to hire them. Most states did not consider rape in marriage to be a crime. The concept of sexual harassment did not exist. And, of course, abortion and contraception were, for the most part, illegal. These are merely a tiny sample of the things that second-wave feminism changed. Pure and simple, women now have far greater access to the worlds of work and politics and are treated with greater dignity in 2007 because of some 40 years of feminist activism. This would be an enormous accomplishment in and of itself. But there is more. While the second wave changed legal and economic structures, its most unique accomplishment may be its creation of a politics of personal life and sexuality, and its intuitive understanding of the ideological importance of language and representation. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the gendered world of actual men and women rested upon the hierarchical organization of the masculine and the feminine.

Journal of Women's History, 2007

the area of race discrimination. Racial harassment cases had succeeded under Title VII, so they used the same law, arguing that sexual coercion in the workplace was sex discrimination in violation of Title VII. Women lost most of these early cases, but appealed them and won several precedent-setting cases by the end of the 1970s. 8 This article focuses on how collective resistance to sexual harassment emerged in the mid-1970s and contributed toward the appellate courts' decisions to reverse the lower courts and rule in favor of sexual harassment plaintiffs. Organized resistance to sexual harassment began with the founding of two grassroots organizations<m>Working Women United in Ithaca, New York, and the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article looks at the feminist activists who founded these organizations<m>who they were and how they shaped the movement against sexual harassment, particularly how their activism contributed toward the precedent-setting appellate court decisions that sexual harassment was sex discrimination in violation of Title VII. Feminist activism grew out of the larger context of second wave activism against sex discrimination in the workplace under Title VII. After it became clear that the agency responsible for enforcing the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was not going to take women's workplace complaints under Title VII seriously, the National Organization for Women (NOW) formed in 1966 to push for enforcement of the Act. 9 In the early 1970s, NOW targeted National Airlines because it had initiated a $9.5 million advertising campaign that required female cabin crew to wear buttons saying "Fly Me." NOW denounced the advertising campaign and worked with National employees to file suit against National Airlines to stop the sexualization of women in the workplace. When activists in Ithaca began to articulate the wrong of sexual harassment, they turned to the National Organization for Women

Industrial Psychiatry Journal, 2018