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Although the Senate has no shortage of clerical staff, female professionals are still expected to act as hostesses, showing a constituent, a defense contractor or a contributor around. In a Senate dining room, a young aide delivering papers to her boss was asked to remove her jacket so that a constituent could get a better look. She did. To someone operating in that atmosphere, perhaps, as Senator Arlen Specter said at Friday's hearing, talk of "women's large breasts" hardly seems such a big deal.
While the Senate is full of selfless older women, happy to substitute the life of the office for a life, it also has a huge contingent of postfeminist younger women, who think being asked to walk the dog and clean up after the mutt is the price one pays for invaluable experience. Says an aide to a Democratic Senator on the Judiciary Committee: "You know what the code is, and if you want to be involved, you know what you have to tolerate. It's happened to me, and I never call anyone on it. You have to show you are tough enough to take a certain kind of harassment."
Fear of hypocrisy may have kept Democrats on the Judiciary Committee from taking charges of a personal nature seriously. Certainly Senator Edward Kennedy -- recently shamed for taking his son and nephew barhopping on a night that ended in an accusation of rape -- is not the ideal person to sit in judgment of someone else's sexual manners. The man who waited 10 hours before reporting that a young female staff member was drowned in his car at Chappaquiddick, and stonewalled for much of the subsequent investigation, must have wanted to avoid the moment that faced him last Tuesday when the situation required a public statement on Hill's allegation: "The Senate cannot sweep it under the rug, or pretend that it is not staring us in the face." Other members have had personal embarrassments as well: Senator Dennis DeConcini is one of the Keating Five; Senator Joseph Biden had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race because of plagiarism; Senator Patrick Leahy had to resign from the Intelligence Committee after admitting he had leaked a confidential document.
After it became impossible to ignore the charges, the Senate's major preoccupation, like that of an exclusive club, was an infraction of its bylaws. Senator John Danforth, Thomas' chief handler, harrumphed, "The cloud of doubt was created by a violation of the rules of the U.S. Senate"; so Danforth maintained that the doubt was not valid. Anyway Thomas had given Danforth his gentleman's word, and that was enough for him. Says Woods: "It's the male, Yale, class response. It's infuriating to women because it's the club they never belonged to."
When a contingent of seven House members marched down the marble halls of the Senate to the Democratic caucus room to ask for a meeting about sexual harassment, they were told they couldn't come in. Said California Congresswoman and Senate candidate Barbara Boxer: "What could be more symbolic than that closed door?" Some Senators "got it" better after some sensitivity training at home. Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jim Exon said they didn't realize how serious the issue was until they talked to their wives. Said Boxer: "If there were more women in the Senate, they wouldn't need to rely on spouses to tell them what's important to 51% of the American population."