Leadership
Anita Hill, Gbowee Speak of Home, Conquering Fear
By Rita Henley Jensen
WeNews editor in chief
Friday, October 21, 2011
Anita Hill and Liberia's Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee prevailed in very different historic confrontations. But this week they expressed a similar longing for home. And both were asked about how they'd faced down fear.
NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)--Two female newsmakers this week addressed different Manhattan audiences in apparently disconnected appearances. Neither one mentioned the other.
But their coincidental appearances created a stereo-effect: Battle-weary women longing for home and onlookers who wondered how they had conquered the fears of their separate, but equally searing historic confrontations.
Anita Hill drew a crowd Oct. 15 of 1,800 or more as the featured speaker at a day-long conference at Hunter College commemorating the 20th anniversary of her Senate testimony on Clarence Thomas's fitness to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. In Hill's latest book, "Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home," she steps back from the issue of sexual harassment and considers how U.S. women, particularly women of color, find a place where they feel they belong.
At a gathering for press two days later, on Oct. 17, Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee from Liberia talked about the pluses and minuses of being given the prize, but also expressed a desire to go home.
Gbowee and her movement of Muslim and Christian women peacefully and forcefully resisted the Liberian armed conflict that had raged for 14 years. The movement is the subject of a documentary, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell." Gbowee credits her receipt of the Nobel to the documentary.
The Hunter College conference, "Sex Power and Speaking the Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later," commemorated the 1991 Thomas confirmation hearings. At the time, Hill told the packed Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that Thomas had consistently sexually harassed her when Thomas was Hill's boss at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She was forcefully cross-examined by committee members and polls indicated that relatively few Americans believed her allegations.
Hill's treatment angered many female voters and is credited with helping to galvanize the election results of 1992, known as the Year of the Woman. Four women that year won Senate seats. They joined Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Democrat Barbara Mikulski and tripled women's presence in the U.S. senate.
Since then, the numbers of female U.S. senators has risen more slowly, to the current 17.
Family History Traced
Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University, author and frequent contributor to The Nation, interviewed Hill, who traced her family's history from being property to owning property.
Hill's grandfather was a slave and became a landowner in Arkansas after the Civil War.
With a rise in lynching there, he moved his family from Arkansas to an Oklahoma farm. Hill grew up on a nearby farm, the youngest of 13 children. Her mother encouraged her to leave home and attend Oklahoma State University by arranging a gift of two Samsonite suitcases from a well-traveled family friend. Hill carried them proudly, even though they were hand-me-downs embellished with another woman's initials.
When it was time for her to leave home again, this time for Yale Law School, her mother purchased a new matching set of suitcases using her Green Stamps, also Samsonite--this time complete with Hill's initials.
Hill, now a professor of social policy, law and women's studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., recounted how she lost her "home" after being pressured to leave her post as a tenured faculty member at Oklahoma Law School and continuing threats of violence.
She is now tracing the loss of "home" that African American women have experienced throughout U.S. history up to the current mortgage crisis. A home provides refuge, financial security and expression, she says. Home is where one feels a sense of belonging, of being welcomed. Throughout U.S. history, from slavery to the Great Migration north in the 1900s, African Americans, particularly women, have been taken from their homes, pushed from their homes or cheated out of their homes.
"So far, the collapse of the housing market--in the chaos--few have spoken about the impact on women, especially women of color," she said. She called on the White House Council for Women and Girls to take on the housing crisis as a racial and a gender issue.
"We need a comprehensive approach. It's not a matter of renegotiating mortgages," she said.
During the question-and-answer session, one member of the audience apologized for asking a personal question, while choking back emotion.
"How do you deal with the fear?" she asked.
Hill leaned forward to single out the speaker with her gaze, saying that the events that made her feel fear became less powerful when she told herself, "I did the right thing."
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Submitted by Janet (1 year ago)
Just an anecdote about home ownership. I am a Canadian, and I live in Canada and visit the USA regularly, with many relatives and some friends in the USA. I could easily afford to buy a home in the USA in many places where the housing prices have dropped. I could not afford to live in the USA, whether in a home or a rented or owned apartment. I cannot afford health care in the USA, and as an older person, I know I will have increasing needs for healthcare.
Thus, home ownership problems may really be based in health care and other expense problems. Home ownership, even if it costs no more than it should as a percent of one's income, may still be too much in order to pay for a ridiculous health-care system that rewards the physicians, the ultrawealthy, the professional athlete, and those at the upper end of the education and ability level and who are not yet old.
Throughout centuries, in most places in the world, health care is seen as a charitable requirement by governments and/or religions, to provide for the health of all those whose knowledge and finances cannot accommodate their health problems. Health care has always and will always require specialized training, thus, to deny access to that for all who cannot afford the top society level of payment, is to me, not the equivalent of most of America's enlightened and compassionate thinking. Just as freedom is a compassionate way of life, freedom with responsibility is, in some areas such as health care, what true freedom is really about. But, I know I do not think like an American in some ways, and I do not mean to offend.