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FROM A MINDSET TO A MOVEMENT

FEMINISM SINCE 1990

by  Astrid  Henry

In the fall of 1991, Rebecca Walker, daughter of renowned author Alice Walker, was a twenty-two-year-

old senior at Yale University, fed up with the stereotype that Generation X—the post-baby-boomer
generation born after 1964—was politically apathetic. Having started a magazine for people of color and
worked on AIDS activism, Rebecca was involved with a number of progressive causes while an
undergraduate. But it wasn’t until October of 1991 that her generation, as she put it, “found a place to

enter the political fray and share our passion for change.”^1 For many, the incentive to step onto a public
political stage was watching Anita Hill, a law professor and former lawyer at the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC), come forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of
sexual harassment—and then subsequently seeing Hill disparaged by an all-white male group of U.S.
senators.
The retirement of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall four months earlier had unexpectedly
created a resurgence of feminist activism, coinciding with the creation of the term “third wave” to
describe new feminists. Marshall was a liberal icon: he had served as the chief counsel to the NAACP
from 1940 to 1961, during which time he argued many cases before the court on which he would later
serve, including most famously Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 case desegregating U.S.
public schools. When named to the Supreme Court by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson in 1967,
Marshall became the first African American justice. His career on the Court had made him an ally to
feminists. His retirement was therefore met with trepidation from those on the left, who awaited the
nomination of his replacement by Republican president George H. W. Bush.
On July 1, Bush announced that he had selected Clarence Thomas, an African American federal judge,
to fill Marshall’s seat. Many saw Bush’s choice of Thomas as cynical: Bush had replaced Marshall with
an African American judge who had spent his career opposing the liberal policies advanced by Marshall,
including affirmative action and abortion rights. Civil rights, feminist, and other progressive groups spent
the rest of the summer protesting the nomination.
But nobody anticipated the spectacle of Thomas’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary
Committee in September and October of 1991, and few who watched these nationally televised hearings
will forget their inherent drama. Anita Hill, an African American lawyer who had worked with Thomas at
both the Department of Education and the EEOC, came forward to provide an account of Thomas’s
sexually harassing behavior in the early 1980s. Hill reported that Thomas had routinely used sexually
offensive language at work, including discussing the size of his penis, joking about pubic hair on a Coke
can, and pressuring Hill to go out with him.
At the time of Thomas’s confirmation hearings, the Senate was still nearly all white and all male, with

only two Asian American male senators and two white women senators.^2 The Senate Judiciary
Committee that oversaw the proceedings—discussing sexual harassment, racism, and gender equality and