# Anita Hill Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American attorney and academic, University Professor of social policy, law, and women's, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. She is known principally for her October 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee during [[Clarence Thomas]]'s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in which she stated that Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked for him at the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and subsequently at the EEOC — the agency then responsible for enforcing federal sexual-harassment law. Hill grew up in Lone Tree, Oklahoma, the youngest of thirteen children of farming parents, graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1977 and Yale Law School in 1980, and was teaching at the University of Oklahoma College of Law when she was called to testify. Thomas denied the allegations and was confirmed 52–48, the narrowest Supreme Court confirmation margin of the twentieth century at that time. ## Why the hearings matter to this vault The 1991 hearings are a durable reference point for several threads the vault tracks. The all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by [[Joe Biden]], declined to call corroborating witnesses who were present and prepared to testify. The proceedings became a template for how confirmation fights over credibly-alleged misconduct would be conducted — a template invoked directly during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings. [[Kimberlé Crenshaw]], who assisted Hill's legal team, has treated the episode as an [[Intersectionality]] case study occurring in real time: Hill was positioned as having betrayed her racial community by naming harassment publicly, while the feminist frame that might have supported her had not reckoned with race — leaving her, in Crenshaw's account, with no stable constituency in either. Thomas's own framing of the hearings as a "high-tech lynching" made the racial dimension explicit while foreclosing the gendered one, which is precisely the structural bind Crenshaw's work describes. Hill has since written *Speaking Truth to Power* (1997) and *Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence* (2021), and chaired the Hollywood Commission on sexual harassment and inequality. ## See Also - [[Clarence Thomas]] — the 1991 confirmation at issue - [[Kimberlé Crenshaw]] — advised Hill's legal team; later analyzed the hearings intersectionally - [[Intersectionality]] — the framework applied to the episode