‘The Year of the Woman’ wasn’t actually that great for women
In 1992, even with tremendous gains, Washington was overwhelmingly male
In 1991, seven congresswomen stood outside of the room in which a group of Senate Democrats were holding their caucus and pounded on the door. The congresswomen felt the group — all men except for Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski — was badly in need of what Representative Louise Slaughter called “the woman’s point of view.” The question at hand was whether the senators had taken seriously Anita Hill’s testimony that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. They knocked and knocked, but each time, they were refused.
‘We were told that nobody ever gets in there,’ Slaughter said, “certainly not women from the House.”
But the following year, their outrage and other long-simmering frustrations would be channeled into electoral politics as record numbers of women began running for office. Women, they reasoned, wouldn’t have to knock on doors anymore if they were already in the room. That year, 11 women were nominated by major parties for Senate seats, and six of them won. The House saw a staggering 106 new women vying for seats, 24 of whom succeeded — more women than had ever been elected to the House at once. It would kick off big gains for women of color, too — the vast majority of those who have served in Congress were elected between 1992 and the present day. “It’s historic,” Katherine Spillar, national coordinator of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, said at the time. “It shows the power of what’s happening this year, with women winning elections that, just a few months ago, the political pundits were saying were impossible.”
The events leading up to the “Year of the Woman” were a perfect storm of women’s issues. George H.W. Bush was in the White House, and set to appoint a conservative Supreme Court justice, which meant that Roe v. Wade was in jeopardy. When he named Clarence Thomas, women were alarmed by the nominee’s conservative views on reproductive health. Then, on television sets all across the country, women watched Anita Hill’s testimony before an all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee with horror.
After stoically recounting Thomas’s continual pressure to go on dates and watch porn with him, and his lewd comments about pubic hair and an adult-film actor named Long Dong Silver, she was then barraged by attacks on her credibility.
Hill sat in the hearing room, unflinching, as Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama asked her if she was “interested in writing a book,” adding that she “could be living in a fantasy world.” Wyoming senator Alan Simpson criticized her actions rather than Thomas’s, saying, “Nobody but you and another witness … has come forward. … That’s pretty heavy. To know that no one has corroborated what is a devastating charge. … It just seems so incredible to me that you would have not only visited with him twice after that period … that part of it appalls me.” Many women, quite reasonably, wondered why that was the outrageous part. (Simpson’s own wife said that her husband and the others “came across like a bunch of bullies.”)
When Thomas addressed the panel and complained that he was being mistreated, Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona consoled him. “I know exactly how you feel,” he said. But no one in a position of power seemed to show any empathy for Hill. “There’s no doubt that awakened a lot of women to an awareness that their voice wasn’t being heard,” Harriet Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, said at the time. In a campaign ad during her bid for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Lynn Yeakel used a clip of her opponent, Arlen Specter, aggressively questioning Anita Hill. Yeakel asked viewers, “Did this make you as angry as it made me?”
Women’s political caucuses had been trying to get the media to pay attention to their candidates for years. But now, with “the Year of the Woman” becoming a household term, the public grew increasingly interested in issues women championed: health, reproductive rights, education. Reporters were suddenly paying attention. “Women candidates see ‘an even playing field’ now,” read a headline in the Boston Globe.
Nowhere was the shift felt more acutely than in California. That year, 71 California women were nominated for federal and state offices. “The days of the cold lonely fights of the ’60s and ’70s, when women were often laughed at as we tried to push for new opportunities, are over,” said soon-to-be congresswoman Lynn Schenk. “No one’s laughing now.”
Newspapers across the country heralded 1992 as the Year of the Woman. But many were skeptical of this media-spun progress narrative. “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus,” Mikulski said. “We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.” The future was female, and women’s power would not be compressed to a single year. “Somebody in Washington must be operating on a Chinese calendar that’s been gum-foozled,” one columnist wrote. Like the Year of the Snake or the Dragon, this year would pass, just as it had in 1984, when pollsters predicted, incorrectly, that women would outnumber men at the polls. Now, in 1992, while the outcomes were unprecedented, one fact remained undeniable: both the House and the Senate were still overwhelmingly male. Progress, it seemed, was maddeningly slow. Rather than the revolution they had hoped for, they had been forced to accept incremental changes, pats on the head, and promises that they would have their big shot soon.
That big shot hasn’t happened — at least not as predicted. Today we find ourselves in familiar territory today. Roe v. Wade again appears to be in jeopardy at the hands of a conservative administration, Congress, and Supreme Court. A slew of other powerful men, including the president, have been accused of sexual harassment and assault, and there have been rollbacks on reproductive health rights and continual failures to protect and promote women’s health. Yet 2018 has again been declared a year for women. In a feature about the new “Pink Wave,” Time magazine reported that “a record number of women are running for office for the first time, and they are poised to transform U.S. politics.” But 229 years after the Senate was created, there have been only 35 women senators, and nearly 2,000 men. The fight to win seats for women is about much more than just numbers. It’s about a shift in priorities. As Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said at the Women’s Convention in October 2017, “Just imagine if Congress was 51 percent women.” Whether this is finally “the moment” or a pipe dream remains to be seen. But if history is any indication, women should be skeptical — and fight harder.
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