Anita Hill is shopping at T. J. Maxx in Woburn when she turns to the customer beside her for a second opinion: "What do you think of these shoes?"
"Anita?" the woman gasps, stunned to be face to face with the person whose name became a household word during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Fortunately, says Hill, that doesn't happen very often, now that 11 years have passed since her testimony on sexual harassment both riveted and divided America. Occasionally, she says, people will say: " 'Oh, you have a very famous name,' and I will say, 'Yes, I do!' " And she will simply smile, relieved at the lack of recognition.
Now a professor of law, social policy, and women's studies at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Hill says she enjoys "regular anonymity" on a campus populated primarily with students who were in elementary school when she exploded into the American consciousness. And after enduring a decade of attacks on her character, hissing and racial epithets from strangers, and the searing glare of fame, that's just fine. "I didn't have any ambition to become a celebrity," she says.
Of course, no one could have predicted that her allegations against Thomas, her former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, would hit with the power of what some likened to a "gender quake." Overnight, everyone in the country seemed to have an opinion about who was telling the truth - Hill, the 35-year-old University of Oklahoma law professor, or Thomas, the controversial black conservative who had been nominated by President George Bush to fill the seat of Justice Thurgood Marshall, a black liberal icon.
For many people, Hill remains a symbol frozen in time: a single video frame of the self-possessed woman in a turquoise suit holding her own against a phalanx of white male senators who, as they grilled her, shifted the focus away from Thomas's fitness for the Supreme Court and, in effect, put her - a witness - on trial.
"I swear that sometimes people still think I'm going to walk in in that same suit, and that's who they think I am," says Hill, now 46. "That wasn't even all of who I was then."
The hearings marked a defining moment in the country's culture wars that had begun in the 1960s, triggered by liberation movements for blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities, women, gay men, and lesbians. During one long Columbus Day weekend, Hill awakened Americans to the plague of workplace sexual harassment.
Thomas ended up winning the seat on the Supreme Court - though by only two votes, the narrowest margin of any successful Supreme Court nominee in history. But as the 1990s unfolded, it was Hill's testimony that resounded. The hearings became a catalyst for landmark legislation and policies on sexual harassment, and they spawned a cascade of political events related to sexual misconduct - from the resignation of Senator Robert Packwood to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Today, Hill retains the same restraint and air of mystery she displayed at the hearings, and she continues to avoid feeding full time on fame. "I think there were a lot of people who wanted me to come out and be this hard-hitting, bombastic, angry, aggressive person and take a leadership role in that respect. I couldn't do that," she says. "That isn't who I was, so that wasn't an option."
Indeed, she's an often reluctant interview subject who staunchly refuses to let the hearings define her. "I was a teacher long before I was a witness," she tells me. I remind her, however, that her testimony was a life-changing experience for many Americans who, by learning more about her story, would gain insights into their own lives and into the decade of profound change in gender relations she helped ignite. "I hadn't thought about it that way," she says.
We spoke a number of times over the past several months - the most in-depth interviews Hill has given since the hearings - but she's clearly most comfortable talking about social and political issues, once declaring, "I'm tired of talking about myself." I expected her reticence but not her humor. "If Gloria Steinem can get married, certainly I can at least date," she says at one point, laughing, as she confirms that for the past year she has had a loving relationship with a Waltham businessman.
Since the Hill-Thomas hearings, I have spent a decade reporting on - and trying to make sense of - the changes in the political and cultural landscape her testimony helped bring about. But for Hill, I had a more personal series of questions. She had never volunteered to become an icon in the culture wars; nor did she know how bad it was going to get. Over the years, I often have wondered, how did this dignified and private woman survive?
Many people forget that Hill had done everything in her power to avoid an open confrontation with Thomas. But someone had leaked to the press her private statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, inciting public outrage and sparking demands - especially from women - that she be heard.
Her testimony was seismic. She said that when she and her boss were supposed to be working, Thomas would sometimes launch into descriptions of pornographic movies involving women with unusually large breasts who engaged in sex "with different people or animals." She said he talked about a largely endowed character named Long Dong Silver as well about his own sexual prowess. Equally bizarre, she said, he once asked her, "Who put pubic hair on my Coke?" He also repeatedly pressured her for dates, she said.
All this happened, she said, when she was 25 years old, only a year or two out of law school. Her goal in testifying, she told the senators, was to give what she believed was relevant evidence about Thomas's character, not to seek redress for a claim of sexual harassment, as so many people wrongly assumed.
Thomas "unequivocally" denied all her allegations and put the senators on the defensive, saying he would not submit to their "high-tech lynching."
Hill was shocked. Her thinking at the time is perhaps best reflected in her 1997 memoir, Speaking Truth to Power: "In my heart I was sure that he would acknowledge the immorality of his behavior, however obliquely, and offer an explanation, if not an apology."
Perhaps naively, Hill expected to give her testimony and resume her private life in Norman, Oklahoma. Instead, she returned home "deeply wounded." Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, had accused Hill of "flat-out perjury." Senator Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, had said he was "getting stuff over the transom" suggesting the committee should "watch out for this woman." Another Republican senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah, had suggested that Hill had combed The Exorcist for the pubic-hair line. The GOP had tried to portray Hill as a spurned woman who had fantasized a sexual relationship with Thomas.
Hoping to find anything to discredit her, Thomas's chief supporter, Senator John Danforth, a minister, even tried to line up a psychiatrist to testify on the rare psychological disorder erotomania, a term for someone with excessive romantic delusions. The Missouri Republican also tried, unsuccessfully, to drum up credible derogatory affidavits from her former law students. At the time, Thomas said Hill's allegations were "scurrilous." (Thomas was not available for comment for this article. A Supreme Court spokeswoman says that Thomas declines all interview requests.)
Once home, Hill faced death threats, strangers condemning her to hell, hostile stares, and stakeouts by reporters. At times, she also had feelings of profound isolation. But then came an avalanche of almost 20,000 letters, most praising her courage. "People would say, 'We have a prayer chain going for you,' " Hill recalls. Or "people would say, 'We've been thinking about you and want you to know you have our support.' And that would lift me spiritually, because it gave me a sense of connection to people."
But her cherished connections to the African-American community were frayed. Some blacks felt she "had violated a spoken or unspoken norm" - what her hearing lawyer Emma Coleman Jordan has called a "gag order" placed on African-American women who have been abused by African-American men.
Then, in 1993, a year and a half after the hearings, David Brock, a writer for the American Spectator magazine, published The Real Anita Hill, a scathing book that Hill has said "hinged on sexual mythology about black women and society's willingness to believe it." Building on a Spectator article in which he had called Hill "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," Brock purported to uncover new and damaging information about Hill and her motives. The book, which reinvigorated the debate about who was telling the truth, soared to the top of bestseller lists. Soon Brock was driving a black Mercedes and living in an expensive 19th-century home in Georgetown, known on the Washington, D.C., gossip circuit as "the house that Anita bought."
In the meantime, Hill was trying to return to her earlier, more placid life as a tenured professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. But as she resumed teaching, her detractors dissected, psychoanalyzed, and lied about her.
Two Oklahoma political activists, E. Z. Million and state Representative Leonard Sullivan, a Republican, mounted a crusade to have Hill - and her supporters - fired. Calling Hill a "cancerous growth," Sullivan even proposed a bill to eliminate the law school. The school's dean and the university's president stepped down in the mid-'90s; Hill and Shirley Wiegand, a law school colleague who had accompanied her to the hearings, resigned in 1997. 
