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Overview
After her astonishing testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings, Anita Hill ceased to be a private citizen and became a public figure at the white-hot center of an intense national debate on how men and women relate to each other in the workplace. That debate led to ground-breaking court decisions and major shifts in corporate policies that have had a profound effect on our lives—and on Anita Hill's life. Now, with remarkable insight and total candor, Anita Hill reflects on events before, during, and after the hearings, offering for the first time a complete account that sheds startling new light on this watershed event.
Only after reading her moving recollection of her childhood on her family's Oklahoma farm can we fully appreciate the values that enabled her to withstand the harsh scrutiny she endured during the hearings and for years afterward. Only after reading her detailed narrative of the Senate Judiciary proceedings do we reach a new understanding of how Washington—and the media—rush to judgment. And only after discovering the personal toll of this wrenching ordeal, and how Hill copes, do we gain new respect for this extraordinary woman.
Here is a vitally important work that allows us to understand why Anita Hill did what she did, and thereby brings resolution to one of the most controversial episodes in our nation's history.
Synopsis
Anita Hill's account of the 1991 Clarence Thomas senate confirmation hearings, and how her decision to speak changed her life.
Library Journal
Hill spoke truth to power during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and found out just how nasty power could be.
Editorials
Library Journal
Hill spoke truth to power during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and found out just how nasty power could be.Michele Goldberg
Toward the end of her memoir, Speaking Truth to Power, Anita Hill writes of her reluctance to campaign for sympathetic politicians. "I am not a rousing speaker. I am slow, methodical, and lack charisma." It's an accurate description of her prose as well. While some of the personal material in Speaking Truth to Power is inherently compelling, the wonkish asides on sexual harassment law and congressional procedures are as dry and plodding as a public policy textbook.Ironically, Hill's uptight style helps make her case -- it's easy to see how someone so reserved could be devastated by sexual comments that might not faze a more freewheeling type. During the hearings, Clarence Thomas' supporters tried to paint Hill as a sexually voracious, spurned woman, but such a woman could never have written this utterly sexless book. She describes the shame of relating Thomas' remark, "Who put a pubic hair on my Coke?" to the congressional committee: "At once, I was twenty-five years old again," she writes. "By that time I had had several jobs and worked with many different people, but never before had anyone ever uttered such an absurdly vulgar and juvenile comment to me. Disgusted and shocked, I could only shake my head and leave the office. I heard him laughing as he closed the door."
The book's greatest contribution is to help those of us who always instinctively believed Hill to understand why she waited 10 years to bring her charges against Thomas and why she called him a dozen times during those years. She's absolutely convincing, explaining that it didn't occur to her -- then a 25-year old neophyte -- to confront Thomas (who was, after all, in charge of the agency that dealt with sexual harassment). It is equally clear why, with her quiet passion for the law, she told congressional investigators about the harassment as soon as they asked. Eventually, Hill took a teaching job at Oral Roberts law school, which lacked both accreditation and prestige, just to get away from Thomas. But given the hostile climate she found herself in at that conservative university, it's no wonder she was unwilling to sever her few professional connections, even those to someone like Thomas. I imagine most women reading Speaking Truth to Power will remember similar instances -- a letter of recommendation from a lecherous teacher, a reference from a sexist ex-boss.
While at the start of the book Hill's primness is grating, her tone eventually lends poignancy to her desperate attempts to retain her dignity during the escalating sexual humiliations of the hearing and its aftermath: "I will not count the number of times, even before the hearing, that I have been threatened with sodomy, rape, assault and other forms of sexual and nonsexual violence." A student columnist called her "dirty, depraved, schizophrenic and grossly sexual, a sheer idiot or a sore liar," and her treatment at the hands of Congress was only a few degrees more civilized. Sen. Alan Simpson said in a veiled threat, "Anita Hill will be sucked right into the -- the very thing she wanted to avoid most. She will be injured and destroyed and belittled and hounded and harassed."
Of course, the reader already knows what's in store for Hill. The chapters when congressional investigators first contact her and her story begins to circulate have a horror-film dimension, as we see her step, naive and afraid, into a political, sexual and racial nightmare. These chapters are the most powerful because they relate the part of the story only Hill can tell. It's the story of a shy 35-year-old woman, sweating under the glare of flashbulbs, terrified by a barrage of death threats, humiliated from relentless questioning about her sex life and horrified to find herself the object of so many powerful men's unbridled hatred and contempt. --SalonNov. 3, 1997