Anita Hill Asks, Has Workplace Changed?

University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in this Oct. 11, 1991 file photo. Thrust briefly back in the spotlight by biting words in Thomas' new book, Hill now is trying to answer this question: Have things gotten better for women in the workplace? (AP Photo/John Duricka, file) (John Duricka - AP)

Peratis, who's representing a New York Rangers cheerleader in another sex harassment case against Madison Square Garden, agrees. "Being able to carry it this far is not something most lawyers and most women can do," she says.

She adds that the broader problem is the common view that women can simply leave their jobs if they're unhappy. "That guy at the cocktail party, you can walk away from. But if it's at work, it's so much more complicated. It has a lot more meaning. What is it going to do to your future?

"I hear it every day, especially from defense lawyers," Peratis says. "'If it was so bad, why didn't she quit? Why did she take it?' The answers are always very complicated."

One specialist in anti-discrimination law complains of a "judge-invented doctrine" that holds that harassment is only illegal if it is severe or pervasive. "This has given license to judges to say to victims, 'yes, you've been harassed, but you haven't been harassed enough,'" says Craig Gurian, an adjunct professor of law at Fordham University.

"It's been a mixed bag," Gurian says of the gains made since the Thomas hearings. "There's greater awareness that sexual harassment is wrong. But there remain a series of problems." The more general obstacle, he says, is psychological: A large segment of society simply doesn't take the harm of discrimination seriously enough. "We haven't made as much headway there as we should have," Gurian says.

As for Hill, she says she's taken aback by the revived debate that has accompanied Thomas' book. "I'm surprised that 16 years later, we're doing this again," she says. "But I think we can look at this as an indication of how critical this issue is, how it affects people very deeply." And this time, she says, the argument isn't merely about what happened when Thomas was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s.

"This round of attention goes to the issue of sexual harassment generally, and how we are going to respond to it," she says. Another question, she adds, is whether Thomas can have an open mind on the bench when it comes to gender issues. "People are questioning his objectivity and his ability to really deal with the facts," Hill says, "given the number of facts he completely ignored or invented in his book."

Hill, who's been in academia since leaving the EEOC in 1983, says she conceived her current project when the 15th anniversary of the Thomas hearings approached. "It suggested to me that I needed to do something to honor those 15 years, something that reconnected me," she says.

She aims to have formed a collection of the letters before the 20th anniversary in 2011, but also wouldn't rule out writing a book before then, though no publishers have contacted her about it.

"This wasn't planned as a response to what he (Thomas) said," says Hill. "Even without his book, these letters are important." And she includes in that description the hate letters, too.

"Those," she says, "will teach us as well."