openly challenging Anita Hill’s testimony–was composed entirely of white men. These senators had little
grasp of the impact that their own proceedings would have on the audience who sat transfixed in front of
their televisions to watch them. The sight of these fourteen men debating the veracity of Hill’s claims and
trying to understand the concepts of sexual harassment and intraracial gender politics “seemed to shake
latent feminists out of their slumber,” wrote feminist commentator Deborah Siegel. “Because of Anita
Hill, scads of younger women realized that some of the rights they had taken for granted were tentative at
best and that accused sexual harassers could get promoted to Supreme Court Justice, while the women
who accused them got discredited and disgraced.”^3 The Senate ultimately voted to confirm Thomas to the
Court; the vote of 52–48 marked the narrowest Supreme Court confirmation vote in over a century.
The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings were a wake-up call for why feminism was still urgently
needed. The Senate Judiciary Committee that oversaw it was a clear sign that the Senate itself was in
need of a feminist revolution. Patty Murray, then a state senator in Washington State, thought while
watching the hearings, “Who [on the Judiciary Committee] is saying what I would say if I was there?”
After talking to other women who were similarly frustrated by the lack of women in Congress, Murray
decided to run for the U.S. Senate in the 1992 elections. So did Carol Moseley Braun, a former
representative to the Illinois State House. Murray and Moseley Braun were joined by Dianne Feinstein
and Barbara Boxer, who, because of a special election coinciding with a regular election, both ran for
separate U.S. Senate seats in California. All four women won their elections, increasing the number of
women in the Senate from two to six (or 6 percent), and making Moseley Braun the first—and so far the
only—African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. In elections for the U.S. House in 1992,
women also increased their ranks, with nineteen new female representatives, for a total of forty-seven
women, or 11 percent of the House. The media called 1992 “the Year of the Woman,” and the
congressional elections (to say nothing of President Bush’s defeat that same year) were seen as a direct
by-product of the Thomas hearings and Anita Hill’s treatment by the male senators. As Eleanor Holmes
Norton, congressional delegate for Washington, D.C., noted: “It is very hard to think of any legal
proceedings that had the effect of the Anita Hill hearings in the sense that women clearly went to the polls
with the notion in mind that you have to have more women in Congress.”^4
The Clarence Thomas hearings also had a major impact on feminists at the grassroots level. A month
after Thomas’s appointment to the Court, a group of women published a nearly full-page statement in the
New York Times. Signed by 1,603 women, “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves”
emphasized the necessity of taking an intersectional feminist approach to understanding how gender, race,
sexuality, and power all converged in the hearings, noting that “many have erroneously portrayed the
allegations against Clarence Thomas as an issue of either gender or race. As women of African descent,
we understand sexual harassment as both.”^5 African American women also responded to the Thomas
hearings in a special January 1992 issue of Ms. magazine whose cover read “Rage + Women = Power.”
Among the contributors to the issue were noted second-wave African American feminists such as Eleanor
Holmes Norton and Barbara Smith, as well as Anita Hill herself. Also included was twenty-two-year-old
Rebecca Walker. Outraged by the Thomas hearings, Walker spoke directly to her peers, urging them to
take up the feminist mantle for a new generation: “So I write this as a plea to all women, especially the
women of my generation. Let Thomas’ confirmation hearings serve to remind you, as it did me, that the
fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage
into political power.” Walker closed the essay with a line that deliberately used feminism’s wave
metaphor to situate herself in feminist history and to galvanize younger feminists into action, encouraging
them to see themselves as the next generation, or wave, of the women’s movement. She wrote: “I am not a