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

• Author: Boo, Katherine
• Position: Sexual harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas - Cover Story

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...