The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 127

THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE OCTOBER 20, 1991 Women want admission to the club that run the workplace. They have paid their dues. Now they want full membership. Cracking the glass ceiling 1 skirt has ever passed that gate, and none ever will." At my first job, I was customarily referred to as "the girL" It was a Hearst paper, and each shift had one woman reporter. Despite the moniker, solo status had its advantages.

Unless a story held a special reason for having a woman report it, assignments were handed out in unbiased rotation. The "girl" got to cover every facet of news. She was not to mistakenly take this to mean that she was one of the regulars, however. Her peculiarity in being a female reporter was often semi-apologetically noted for the readers. Among my newsclips are several with a headline stating, "Girl reporter covers" whatever it was, from murder to presidential campaigns.

As more women got on news staffs, more evenhanded acceptance came, too. For me it was when Vice President Richard Nixon visited Harvard. Even as press people jostled to get into the Dillon cage, where an all-male audience awaited, the doorkeep announced that no women meaning me as the only woman reporter there were to be admitted. Men colleagues swept him aside saying, "She's not a woman, she's a newspaperman." loretta McLaughlin The Hill-Thomas confrontation has spawned many replays of the Thurberesque war-between-the-sexes in which men in high places sit around wringing their hands and inquiring in unison what do women want, what do they really want. As if we all don't know.

In the workplace, women want what men want Acceptance. Acceptance into the group. Acceptance on merit Full acceptance, not tokenism. They want to be included as a full-fledged equal. They want the same door to promotion open to them as to men and they want it open equally wide.

They want equal pay for equal work. This is not the way it has been. Everyone knows that, too. While there are still miles to go before gender equity is the norm in the workplace, there also is no doubt that the lot of working women is infinitely better today than it was, even in the recent past As a woman who has been in the work force since the Fifties, I know whereof I speak. When I first went to a newspaper, a suburban entry point, looking for a job, the editor snarled, "See that gate (to the newsroom).

No At my first job, I was customarily referred to as 'the girl." CATHERINE KANNER OP ART one could see what women are up against in that scenario. tiH What women really want isacf-' mission to the club what has'Been1 until now the good-old-boys club that-ran the workplace. Women have paid; their dues. Now they want full menW bership. -if The fuss is only in small, partf about sexual harassment or evep ter proprieties of male-female cp(nge-(.

niality on the job. It is about gfildefy equality and fair play. And everyone really knows that Loretta McLaughlin is associate edi-t tor of the editorial page. Barriers to success are subtler now. Overt discrimination against women, as with all other legal minorities, violates the law.

Drags on their advancement have to be much more delicately managed. Are they real? Oh, yes. The business world is familiar with the glass ceiling that keeps women from extensive participation at the top in many companies, though happily fewer and fewer. And there is still the difficulty of having to break through a network of entrenched male bonding so visibly displayed during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Every- Getting into the circle is one thing.

Getting somewhere within the circle is another matter, as both working men and women know. But it is undeniably harder for women. At the Boston Herald-Traveler, a defunct but once prominent newspaper, the sex-bias lesson was more bitter to learn. Having risen to the rank of news specialist, I found that men colleagues who did no more or better than I were paid far more. The response to my protest was that I had to accept my biological fate.

The difference in pay had nothing to do with the relative merit of our work. I would never be paid as much as the men, I was told, "because you are a woman." This picture has changed. Women abound in the workplace today -including the newspaper field. And they get ahead, though they often are still paid within margins of salary ranges for the same job rather than on strictly equal terms. After the Thomas affair, progress or silence? A vote for kids i'JT Supreme Court nomination fused so many issues at one time.

Besides abortion, there was sexual harassment and sexual stereotypes, lying, judicial qualifications, Senate cowardice and incompetence, general national indifference to the cowardice and incompetence until the issue included sex, mean-spirited politics, affirmative action, class attitudes, the right to privacy, natural law, pornography, bootstrapping, race pride and race hypocrisy. It is possible that political movements are about to be born or revamped. It is also possible that we will be so intimidated by the volume of issues that we will be as silent as Anita Hill said she was after her alleged abuse. Will more women now come forward with more claims of harassment or be in fear of being called a nutcake? Will men take women more seriously as people or waste lunch hours lamenting the good old days of whistle and leer? Will white women who were so quick to leap to affirm Hill's allegation of harassment work harder against racism? Will African Americans inform themselves so that we can debate people like Thomas on their records, or will we continue to galvanize in passive support of anybody with dark skin? Can we debate sex and race as independent issues? The most eerie sight at the Capitol last week was the corner where people waved signs saying "Honk if you like Clarence Thomas." People honked and thrust black-power fists out of their windows. If Thomas, hired by Ronald Reagan to dismantle equal protections, had been white, African Americans would have brutally declared him unfit for the court As for sex and race, many rallied to Thomas with the cry "They're out to get the brothers." Well, Republicans Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch sure got the sister.

They viciously accused Anita Hill of perjury and fantasy. The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were stupefied. They had no mission, no strategy, and were just as white and male as the Republicans. They sank into chairs and mumbled questions to Thomas that no one understood. Will people who claim anger at surly Republicans or betraying Democrats actually vote to change a Senate that is 98 percent men and 99 percent white? Will the aggrieved in this nation speak up for themselves, or will President Bush remain unchallenged in his claim that he knows more about what women and African Americans think than their "leaders?" Will we poke through the embers to start new flames of awareness or watch the coals grow cold with acquiescence? It may be true, as Faye Wattleton declared, that "the clock can never go back to what it was 75 years ago." It is also true that another mentality still exists.

On my flight home from the Thomas confirmation, the male pilot came on the intercom. He referred to the stewardesses as "girls." Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist DERRICK Z. JACKSON WASHINGTON The 75th anniversary dinner of Planned Parenthood Wednesday night was an assembly of smoldering embers. Its latest target, Clarence Thomas, he of the sexual-harassment charge and the unbelievable claim he has never discussed the Roe v.

Wade decision legalizing abortion, was now on the Supreme Court and beyond reproach. The increased certainty that Roe v. Wade will be gutted had the dinner charged with bold proclamations of women maintaining rights at the state level and running for office. Former Rep. Bella Abzug said, "The Supreme Court does not run this country.

The people will not let their rights be taken away." Jacqueline Jackson of Planned Parenthood's national board said, "You will see the greatest women's movement since the suffragettes." There was also disquiet Jackson said class divisions still make it difficult for low-income women, the women who would lose the most access to abortions, to feel included in the struggle for reproductive rights. Faye Wattleton, Planned Parenthood's president, who testified against Thomas in the Senate hearings, said, "My sense is things will get much worse before they get better." It was not just members of Planned Parenthood who dwelled heavily on this moment The Thomas confirmation was a watershed event No porters got children on the "This is an experiment We're asking if the people are going toiii be more farsighted than City i jrc Hall," says Brodkin. Despite oneJJ poll that showed 75 percent uun port, she adds, "I don't sleep at night." i The Cfuidren's Amendmentt doesn't ask for new tax dollars. ij. asks that for the next 10 years kids get a larger portion.

In the first year, 1.25 percent of property taxes would go to this purpose; in each of the next nine years, the figure would be 2.5 percent, adding about $13 million more to child care, prenatal care, job ift training for teen-agers, and health and social services. This is by no means a perfect idea, as even its advocates The money that goes to children; i must come from somewhere and there are needs all around the Bay city. Many supporters of Proposition worried at first that the amendment would precipitate' generational warfare, or pit AIDS patients against homeless chil- dren against public workers. But the list of endorsers in-o i eludes senior citizens, gays, police) An election burden for Bush i i The list of endorsers includes senior citizens, police, politicians. Ellen Goodman Kids don't vote.

We have heard this cry so often that it's hard to know any longer if it's a lament or an excuse for the neglect of the youngest and poorest Americans. Why don't children's concerns reach the top of the government agenda? Kids don't vote. Why doesn't child care, child abuse, child health, child housing get a priority bid for our tax dollars? Kids don't vote. Why doesn't the White House, the State House, City Hall pay more attention to their needs? Kids don't vote. There is something sad about this generic, all-purpose answer and something cynical as well.

It's as if the every-man-for-himself, me-first wrestling for tax money were a given, as if there were no longer any belief in the common wealth. And as if politicians were helpless in the face of the "reality" that after all kids don't vote. But this fall, as national concern grows about the deteriorating condition of our young, the people of San Francisco have become part of an experiment On Nov. 5, this city with a smaller percentage of children than any other of its size will vote on a Children's Amendment. Proposition as it is formally listed on the ballot, would change the city charter to mandate the use of a small portion of property-tax money specifically for children.

A group of advocates, frustrated and despairing, have decided to bet everything on the hope that the public is miles ahead of the politicians. As Margaret Brodkin, the head of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, which authored this amendment, describes: "Kids have been just so shortchanged. Even the most liberal, progressive politicians have been wonderful on the rhetoric and wanting to do the right thing. But when push came to shove and the resources were limited, they didn't want to waste political chits on a constituency that had no clout." In San Francisco, as in every big city, the budget brokers have been juggling all the mounting woes of urban life. But as reports of child abuse in the city increased 400 percent, with 5,000 children listed among the homeless, with the day-care waiting lists reaching 8,000, the children's share of the budget, according to Coleman Advocates, went down.

So this spring, with 68,000 signatures in a city of 750,000, sup- and, more remarkably, politi-cians. Seven out of the 11 city sun; pervisors support it. Mayor Ar(j Agnos, who is running for tion, calls it "an idea whose time has come." These are the politicians who could have increased funds for children on their own. Why didn't they? Agnos speaks of the "competing priorities" and -then adds, "Kids don't vote." In polls, Americans say they 'hx are worrying about kids. In suiybn veys they say, yes, we would tax xi ourselves to educate, house, care for the young.

But nearly ery attempt to translate that alarm into policy is paralyzed. We have come to the sorry place where even politicians are asking: to be saved from politics as if ol'il; they were paralyzed in the the process. So an experiment, born of desperation, is facing its first came the hatchet man for the White House nominee. That should not be forgotten when Specter stands for reelection. There was Sen.

Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who, in the final debate on the floor, concluded that Hill had magnified her testimony before the Judiciary Committee and lied. Finally, there was Sen. Dennis DeConcini who, in wimplike fashion, equated all of Thomas' difficulty on the sexual-harassment charge not with the facts in the case, but with the proposition that Thomas had been done in by a leak to the press. DeConcini recalled a leak to the press about his participation in an attempt to bail out a savings-and-loan artist in Arizona which has cost the nation millions of dollars. There is no doubt that the Republicans did a skillful job for the television audience.

It was packaged just the way Roger Ailes, Bush's campaign adviser, handled the Bush campaign in 1988. There was Willie Horton against the man who had struggled from poverty in a Horatio Alger story. There was the American flag versus a shunned woman. And there was a cover-up. The character witnesses for Thomas, most all on the public payroll, were displayed as "Mary Six-packs," members of the bowling league.

The-witnesses for Hill, who testified about the substance of her testimony and her character, were pictured by the Republicans as Mary and Joe Granola, spaced-out versions of the '60s. The White House has vigorously ry Judge Scalia's briefcase. The obligation then on the part of the president is that he should nominate a person to the court who could at least be said to be highly qualified by the American Bar Association. He did not Bush should also bear the burden in the next election of what was a Republican team effort not only to nominate Thomas but also to destroy Anita Hill. While Biden bent over backward to be fair to Thomas' witnesses and to the nominee himself, the Republican team of senators called Hill a liar, questioned her sanity for bringing a sexual-harassment charge, and, by twisting and distorting Hill's statements, concluded she had committed perjury.

This was Willie Horton all over again. There was that champion of women's rights, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), leading unqualified witnesses to the conclusion that Anita Hill was fanatasizing, that if there wasn't a pattern of sexual harassment on Thomas' part, he certainly could not have committed this one instance of sexual harassment with Hill. There was the outrageous extrapolation by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) from two statements by Hill that she had committed perjury.

Specter knows better. He had conducted himself 'm a difficult job of being the chief defender of Thomas with some honor, and then went over the hill on the perjury charge in an effort to destroy her. Specter had portrayed himself as not being an advocate for either side, but he be- ROBERT HEALY The fallout from the nomination of Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court will ultimately end up in the lap of President Bush, as it should. For the present, everyone is jumping on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is unfair. There are those in both the liberal and conservative spectrums of the press who say that the Judiciary Committee created a circus, that there never should have been public hearings.

What would have happened if the committee and its chairman, Sen. Joseph Biden, had sat on the charge? What if it had conducted its investigation in secret, dismissed it as not worthy, and then the charge became public after Thomas became a member of the court? This was a serious charge, made public by a leak to the press, and from that point, there was no other course. I support the idea that President Bush has the right to name right-wing nominees to the Supreme Court Bush and Ronald Reagan made no secret in the campaigns for the presidency that they would appoint conservative judges to the court. And in the Reagan appointment of Anonin Scalia, the Reagan administration appointed a brilliant conservative who is a lot more capable of changing the course of the country than Judge Thomas. But Judge Thomas could not car ERIC ORNER ILLUSTRATION denied orchestrating the Thomas affair before the Judiciary Committee.

When Thomas decided to wing it and denounce the processes of democra-i cy as if he were entitled to a seat on the Supreme Court without examination, there was said to be some embarrassment about Thomas in the White House. But what was created at the hearings on Thomas had a pattern, and that pattern was the election campaign of 1988. And there ought to the a price for that, at least among women. Ban rancisco under the watchful eyes of other cities and other citizens. "If we have to tie-, their hands to get policy to fund prenatal care," says km, so be it Now it's up to the grown-ups.

f-r- Ellen Goodman is a Globe colum-' nist Robert Healy is a former Globe col umnist.