The organization woman: the real reason Anita Hill stayed silent.

After Benito Mussolini's death in 1945, secretary after cabinet wife after maid came forward to declare that she had been raped by Il Duce. One woman described to a biographer being thrown on the floor and ravaged brutally on repeated occasions. Repeatedly? asked the horrified biographer. Why did you go back?

One cannot, the woman replied coolly, "refuse a man of such importance."

Alan Simpson was befuddled. It would remain, he said wearily, "a puzzlement for me forever." How could it possibly be that an intelligent, educated woman would continue a relationship with a man who had showered her with such a "foul, foul presentation of verbiage," who had inflicted upon her the greatest humiliation of her life? "I shall never understand that," the senator concluded, "and it remains one of my great quandaries."

It was the gravamen of the trial of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings: the unsettling notion that, after so much humiliation, Hill would follow her boss to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and continue her relationship with him through phone calls and social gatherings throughout the decade. That sustained contact was one of the few undisputed facts of the case. It was the why that no one seemed to agree on.

To Democrats, Hill's behavior placed her in the classic category of the repressed and long-suffering victim. To Republicans, it showed she was a liar. But as 14 of the most ambitious men in America pondered the psychic mysteries of Anita Hill, none seemed to recognize that the woman in front of them was not much different from them. Hill wasn't delusional. She wasn't totally helpless. And to the American working woman, she sure wasn't very mysterious. Could it be that, for all her religious sensibility, all her suffering, Anita Hill was a careerist? Perhaps, like thousands of senators and investment bankers and, uh, Supreme Court nominees before her, she chose to compromise herself to advance her own career.

I believe Anita Hill. I believe her recounting of implied threats, insinuating language, sexual pressure. I suspect Clarence Thomas is a dangerous man. In fact, that's my problem with the people who now cast Hill as some sort of reluctant Joan of Arc. While the majority of Americans didn't quite accept that a sane woman would endure so much psychological strain simply to keep a job, poll after poll showed that many professional women do. Congressional phone lines crackled with sympathy and outrage; women in pumps took to the streets bearing militant signs. As one Village Voice writer exulted, "Anita Hill is the black woman I've been waiting to see on TV all my life."

Yet as women chisel the modest Hill into a latter-day feminist hero, they may be validating a radically unfeminist, unheroic choice. As Hill indicated explicitly and unapologetically during her testimony, given the choice between doing the right thing and making the right career moves, she repeatedly chose the latter. It was a "reasonable" choice, as Hill put it during her testimony. It was also a selfish one. And that's a distinction worth remembering, because it tells us something, not just about Anita Hill, but about ourselves.

As women who work daily in an unaccommodating world, we may justify Hill's decade of silence because we've come to accept the moral calculus that undergirded it - the necessity of muting one's principles in the name of some future professional accomplishment. That alienating ethos, once largely the province of men in gray flannel suits, is now so entrenched in the working woman's world that few of us step back to examine its moral implications. But Anita Hill's choice of silence, if we're willing to see it, it a study in those implications.

Sexual harassment, especially when chained to threats of professional sabotage, is a peculiarly insidious kind of victimization. And in today's world, coming forward to testify to one's victimization - to publicize a private humiliation - may be even more painful than the harassment itself. But the supporters who use these two truths to make Hill's passivity more palatable might better use them to disdain it. By refusing for 10 years to speak out against her patron - not just to stop the man perpetuating the evil, but to set an example for other women or minorities facing discrimination - Hill hurt other women. Indeed, if we remove the mantle of sisterhood that disciples have draped on her actions, we find, not a feminist martyr, but the philosophical kin of Clarence Thomas, that stalwart opponent of affirmative action. I survived, didn't I? Hill's choices seem to say. Now let everyone else sink or swim on her own.

Yes, it seems coldly idealistic to suppose anyone should jeopardize her career for some amorphous public interest - and colder still when that person is a young black woman who eventually came forward only to find her character on trial. But it's important for women to acknowledge, no matter how caught up we are in the quest for professional equality, that she - we - could have. Women can choose principle over professional status; they can decide that integrity matters more than a rung up on the corporate ladder. Anita Hill didn't. And as women raise her up today, we may also be lowering our standards for both personal virtue and a more humane working world.

Star struck

Jesse Jackson compared her to Jesus, and the press wasn't too far behind. The New York Times attributed her coming forward to "the moral courage of Eleanor Roosevelt." Time invoked Harriet Tubman, Sojouner Truth, and Rosa Parks. But as Anita Hill's testimony made clear again and again, sacrificing in the name of honor - the standard barometer of courage - wasn't really her modus operandi. She eventually stood and fell on principle, but only when it came at minimal professional cost.

During her testimony, Hill described the harassment by Thomas as one of the most "embarrass[ing] and humiliat[ing]" experiences of her life. His conversations with her were "very ugly. They were very dirty. They were disgusting." At one point, she noted, the stress his actions provoked caused her to be hospitalized for five days. Yet Hill chose to endure. "Perhaps I should have taken angry or even militant steps, both when I was in the agency or after I left it," she testified, "but I must confess to the world that the course that I took seemed the better, as well as the easier, approach." Easier is indisputable; Clarence Thomas was a powerful man. But why better? "I was aware ... that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career. And I did not want, early on, to burn all the bridges to the EEOC."

In other words, Hill did what men have been doing since Peter denied Jesus in a Jerusalem courtyard: compromising personal principle to promote immediate self-interest. But at least Peter feared for his life. Hill feared for her career. Like thousands of corporate technicians before her - Bill Moyers to LBJ, Michael Deaver to Ronald Reagan, Pete Williams to Dick Cheney - she had hitched her wagon early to a star, and as Thomas grew increasingly influential, no mere personal humiliation would keep her from exploiting that connection, both in government and outside it. As the phone logs indicate, Hill used her personal relationship with Thomas repeatedly over the years - for references, for assistance in getting a grant, for networking. In discussions about Thomas with colleagues, she lauded his performance. "[O]ne of the things that I have said was that I intended to - I hoped to keep a cordial professional relationship with that individual," testified Hill. One reason, she explained, "was a sense that I could not afford to antagonize a person in such a high position." While Hill repeatedly denied that she attempted to benefit from Thomas's patronage, it's pretty hard not to suspect that, out there in the hinterlands, the ability to snag the head of the EEOC for a civil rights conference or a personal reference might be worth a few professional miles.

That doesn't, of course, make Hill a scoundrel. It just doesn't make her very brave. Indeed, it was only after her connection to Thomas had been exploited - after she had secured tenure at the University of Oklahoma Law School and success in her own right - that she began to view coming forward as a legitimate option. When Hill was asked by the Judiciary Committee why she had finally decided to speak out, her response was resoundingly devoid of the sense of principle women now attempt to impose on her actions. She came forward, Hill explained, because "my career is on solid ground."

If the intervening decade of deracination seemed an eminently acceptable compromise to Hill, she was not alone in her assessment. "I think that is something that a woman in that situation would do," Hill's friend Ellen Wells observed in her corroborating testimony. "You think, yes, perhaps this job is secure," she later elaborated, "but maybe they will post me in an office in a corner with a telephone and The Washington Post to read from nine to five, and that won't get me anywhere. So you are quiet and you are ashamed and you sit there and you take it."

The mass recognition triggered by Hill's testimony only confirmed Wells's sad assertion. Millions of women, from Nina Totenberg to Wanda Baucus to Dennis DeConcini's mother, it seemed, had been ashamed, sitting there, taking it. "Who wants to be a feminist martyr," snapped a friend who made exactly Hill's choice. "You'd do the same thing." Perhaps. And clearly, Hill's embrace of the "easier" solution was a forgivable, human response to an extremely stressful situation. Nevertheless, compromise in the pursuit of professional success often has a secondary moral cost - an abstraction made perfectly concrete in the Thomas-Hill relationship.

Much has been made of Thomas's role as the head of the EEOC. How appalling, opponents rightfully noted, that the ultimate advocate of American civil rights might have been a vulgar violator of the same. And indeed, Thomas, if guilty of such crass intimidation, should be expelled from public life. But Hill had a public obligation too. As a black woman, she knew better than most people how pervasive and insidious discrimination can be. As a lawyer, shef fully understood her rights. As an employee of the EEOC, she was a prominent cog in the agency assigned to encourage coming forward, speaking out, ending the stigma, and ultimately the practice, of sexual abuse. And, finally, as a heavily and conventionally credentialed professional, she had far more public credibility (and career options, if worse came to worst) than thousands of housekeepers, clerks, and secretaries subjected to similar outrage. In other words she was well positioned to make a stand for women everywhere (and especially in Thomas's office). Yet she withheld information the public should have known in order to retain her patron and, thus, her career.

"I can only say that when I made the decision to just withdraw from the situation ... that I may have shirked a duty, a responsibility that I had," admitted Hill at one point - only one point - during her testimony. "[B]ut that was my best judgment at the time." Forget Sojourner Truth; Ron Ziegler or Robert Gates might be more apt comparisons.

Like most other corporate conformists, Hill confronted a Hobson's choice. If she had come forward in 1982, she would've faced the firestorm: a neophyte accusing a prominent black Republican, a rare and heavily protected species. She might have lost her livelihood, derailed her promising career. She might well have been a martyr. But what her supporters elide is that Hill could have made that choice - as did Rosa Parks, who risked her job as a seamstress and even her life to stand up (or sit down) for her rights. Still, you don't have to dust off ancient icons to find examples of feminine courage. Consider the not noticeably hagiographic Dawn Ceol, a journalist who also confronted the moral crucible during the Thomas hearings.

The weekend Hill testified, Ceol was covering the chaos for The Washington Times. That Sunday night, John Doggett, a man whose insight into Hill's motives was gleaned from "intuition," "body language," and other rigid psychological tests, testified to her tendency to fantasize. Ceol wrote her story, giving Doggett's theory past-the-jump placement. She awoke the next morning to find the original head-line - "THOMAS ACCUSER LAUDED, ASSAILED" - transformed to "MISS HILL PAINTED AS |FANTASIZER,'" and the lead rewritten to legitimize Doggett's conclusions. Like Hill, Ceol felt her integrity had been affronted and the public misled. Like Hill, she understood that the professional cost of following her conscience would be considerable, especially in the current, abysmal market for journalists. She quit her job that day.

In today's ethical cosmos, the prudent Anita Hill, not the impulsive Dawn Ceol, is the model: a woman who subsumed integrity for the "greater good" of professional achievement - who did, in short, what ambitious men have often done. The trouble was, she forsook what women have often claimed to have: a fundamental sense of their larger moral responsibility.

Sole sisters

In the 16th century, Baldesar Castiglione issued the prototype of 20th-century America's corporate how-to: careful instructions for courtiers seeking success in the Renaissance's vicious royal circles. "Even if it goes against his nature," Castiglione lectured, the savvy courtier "has the discretion to discern what pleases his prince, and the wit and judgment to act accordingly, and the considered resolve to make himself like what he may instinctively dislike."

What was known as superior servitude in the Renaissance rat race, modern man called playing the corporate game: winning friends and influencing people as a means to financial success. This "outer-directed man," as Harvard sociologist David Riesman observed in the fifties, understood that he must tailor his behavior, indeed his very character, to win the winks and nods of the corporate powers that might reward him. It was a conformity many educated women treated with healthy skepticism even as they entered the workforce in droves during and after World War II. We do not, said Simone de Beauvoir archly, "confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness," and social scientists tended to agree. While women obviously had no monopoly on integrity (everybody knows a few real-life Lady Macbeths), writers from Freud to Carol Gilligan noted that the average woman tended to weigh her choices - in relationships, daily life, work - in a context far broader than the rewards they brought her personally. Just getting yours wasn't enough. You generally wanted the people around you to get theirs too - even if it meant you had to give a little away.

Of course, when women were at home raising families, that moral acuity seemed well and good for the world. In Edward Erikson's view, the "mother variable" - the compassion and humanity of women - gave them the power not just to mitigate the impersonal tendencies of corporate man but to prevent the nuclear destruction of the planet. To countless sixties feminists, it was the linchpin of peaceful one-worldism. But to a new generation of working women, that eternal difference was about as useful as a gold-plated Hoover. A remarkable amplitude of empathy, women discovered, had remarkably little market value.

"It is obvious," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex." It is equally obvious, she added, that "it is the masculine values that prevail." She might have been speaking of the Fortune 500 in the eighties. As women began hitting the glass ceiling en masse, it became increasingly clear that the corporate world wasn't suddenly going to start valuing compassion over killer instinct. It was also clear that women's competitiveness in the workforce had become an issue not of "personal fulfillment" but of economic necessity. By the mid-seventies, real wages began to decline and traditional wage earners found it more and more difficult to support families on a single income. There was little time for quasi-Marxist social transformations. Women, not the corporate world, would have to do the changing. Thus, two decades after Riesman chronicled the moral poverty of the corporate poltroon, faux-feminist magazines began appropriating for their sex the brownnosing and venal chicanery that men had so long mastered. "[S]tructurally speaking, your boss has life-and-death power over you," cautioned Games Mother Never Taught You, a late-seventies bestseller. "There is no way you can leapfrog, bypass, overrule, ignore, challenge, disobey, or criticize your boss and not get penalized in the game."

By the time Anita Hill and millions of other women entered the workforce in the early eighties, dozens of such manuals for women were on the market. While some books, like Marilyn Loden's Feminine Leadership, noted that in the long run, female climbers would achieve power and "humanize" corporate culture, it was perfectly clear what had to come first. Games Mother Never Taught You ordered ambitious women to stop their lousy habit of "helping everyone but themselves" and "learn to act more like a man." To make the dog-eat-dog ethic more palatable, advised another early-coronary manual, The Right Moves, "eliminate the notion that the people with whom you work are your friends" - advice Anita Hill apparently took to heart in keeping her silence.

For once, the materialist creed of the paperback dovetailed with more sophisticated feminist thinking. The fact that men remained the gatekeepers of the professional world was one of the great barriers to equal opportunity. Thus women who refused to compete weren't just abandoning their own chances for professional success, they were lessening the likelihood that their "sisters" would be able to achieve it, too. Hence one of Ms. magazine's chief functions in the seventies was to celebrate women who had unnicely accrued professional success. The message was, from all angles, pretty clear. Women's characteristic predilection toward empathy - the quality that pre-Thatcherite peaceniks had promised would foster world harmony - was, in the new cosmology, a self-destructive vice.

By the end of the eighties, the rhetoric had softened, but that didn't mean women weren't still kissing ass and popping Rolaids - or that the corporate world had changed enough that they didn't have to. Only 2 percent more were in professional specialties in 1988 than in 1973. College educated women still earned only 59 cents for every dollar made by men - a ratio that had held for 25 years. Women were also 50 percent more likely to live below the poverty line. But their aspirations hadn't budged. The number of women leaving "nurturing" professions like teaching and social work to pursue law and business degrees skyrocketed in the eighties. And once in the workforce, they weren't noticeably easing up. When Felice Schwartz concocted the Mommy Track, the real story was how few professional women wanted to get on it. And last year, Mademoiselle magazine looked with bewilderment at descriptions of the nineties as a more relaxed, less careerist decade. Not for today's women, thank you. In the new feminist ethic of "work machismo" - 14-hour workdays, ruthless competition - "pulling all-nighters has become a status symbol (again)."

What are they staying up all night for? In these baedeckers of corporate mastery, issues larger than securing the boss's approval - standing up for one's beliefs, showing compassion to others, even turning out a socially worthwhile product - don't come up too often, which is probably just as well, considering the values advocated when they do. One recent how-to, Taking Stock, advises women subjected to sexual harassment to threaten reporting it (but not to actually report it) only as a last resort. Still, before you do, girls, consider this: "It will also destroy the possibility that your career objectives will get any support from him."

"I mean, my goodness gracious," burst Ellen Wells, explaining why she didn't advise Hill to go forward. "You can open up any women's magazine and you can go to seminars on how women are supposed to learn to network since we don't have the Old Boys Club. Take up tennis! Take up golf, ladies! Learn to get out there so you can do these things to maintain your contacts. And so you don't burn your bridges." There's a vast degree of difference between golf games and criminal sexual harassment, but the continuum is real. Many of us are trying desperately, in Castiglione's phrase, to like what we instinctively dislike. And that self-denial may seem to the average modern woman a reasonable price to pay for self-promotion.

Our right to choose

As Anita Hill's life suggests, such pragmatism tends to pay off decently. If she's not the brightest star from Yale Law's class of '83, at a relatively young age she has achieved tenure and status at a large law school - an accomplishment that, had she solicited notoriety as a whistleblower at 25, might well have been a pipe dream. Instead, as Oklahoma's tenure committee lucubrated over Hill's future, no messy accusations obscured that glistening resume; there were no whispers of "whiner," "lesbian," or "prude." And that soothing conventionality was precisely what the contracts lawyer craved.

Like so many other minorities and women, Hill had accepted the harsh bootstrap ethic of the Reagan era, internalized it, and endured. In accordance with her "best judgment" - her essential conservatism - she asked for no help when she was victimized. She didn't give any help, either. And that's what is lost as professional women affirm the Hill ethic today: respect for women's historical, and critical, tendency to sacrifice personal interest in the name of something larger than self.

To forsake the organization, stand up to the man, and insist that a powerful wrong be corrected - that was Anita Hill's alternative back in 1982. Blinded by ambition, she didn't see it. Blinded by our own ambition, we can barely make it out either. And in the long run, that moral myopia may do far more damage to women's interests than the ascendance of one Honorable Clarence Thomas.