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Drawing on the strikingly different records of the 103rd and 104th Congresses — congresses in which women’s proportional presence was roughly similar — this introduction to Part I highlights the empirical evidence of the complexity belying the probabilistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women. This lays the foundation for comparing and contrasting gender’s impacts on policymaking as the environment changes, examining how women’s efforts to bring (feminale) gendered perspectives to the policymaking process affect and are affected by (masculine) gendered institutions, assessing the implications for the connection between descriptive and substantive representation of women, and exploring what this may mean for all citizens in a representative democracy. Special attention is devoted to why the 103rd and 104th Congresses are an ideal laboratory for exploring the dynamic, probabilistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women.

Chapter one begins with Anita Hill, situates the study at the beginning of the 1990s (with roots in the 1980s) within the context of post-Reagan neoliberalism, and argues that Anita Hill’s testimony initiates a new phase in the history of discrediting women’s public accounts of agentic response to sexual harassment. The chapter goes on to theorize that sexual harassment offers a test case of how the social contract, based as it is in a public/private split, is confounded by the presence of women in the workplace as citizens, workers, professionals, colleagues, and sexual agents rather than objects. Finally, the chapter examines how race and gender migrated in relation to judgment about Hill’s and Thomas’s life stories and claims the purposeful use of racism and sexism in the hearings.

Evangelicalism has long provided American culture with the vocabulary through which to talk about sex and who can appropriately engage in it. This chapter briefly discusses six general presumptions of evangelical thinking about sex, gender, and race inspired by feminist theorist Gayle Rubin; these elements help frame specific excerpts of evangelical marriage and sexual advice literature, which naturalize hypersexual men and their passively sexual women. The chapter discusses the substantial racial subtexts at work in these excerpts that tacitly connect whiteness (and white sexuality, in particular) with moral virtue, and describes how these have become American ideals. To see these ideals at work, a case study compares the scandals of Anita Hill (versus Clarence Thomas) and Paula Jones (versus Bill Clinton). Both Hill and Jones were deemed sexual failures by the American public according to the evangelical standards for female sexuality that were used to define their credibility.

This chapter examines how the Supreme Court confirmation process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh closely followed a white male heterosexual double standard that is often at the center of political sex scandals, one inspired by the evangelical norms that this book has discussed. Kavanaugh was the 2018 Supreme Court nominee (and current Justice) accused by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford of a sexual assault. The chapter analyzes the Ford/Kavanaugh testimonies in relationship to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas case. This comparison highlights the racial and gendered mechanics by which all four characters were judged. While Ford was regarded by many as a credible witness from the standpoint of her demeanor and testimony, the author argues that Kavanaugh was able to draw on a variety of raced and gendered symbols that solidified the support of his political peers, including Donald Trump. In short, Kavanaugh’s demeanor as a white, angry, sexualized adolescent granted him a considerable advantage.

This chapter examines the villain vs. victim card used in the debate over sexual politics in America. From the beginning conservatives used Paula Jones’s case not only to attack Bill Clinton but to accuse feminists of a hypocritical double standard. With the breaking of the scandal involving Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, conservatives intensified their demands for feminists to attack Clinton the same way they attacked Clarence Thomas, who was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment. Despite the fact that Lewinsky had been over twenty-one during the (then still alleged) affair and had not complained of harassment or indeed complained at all, right-wing champions pronounced her a victim of at best exploitation, at worst child-molesting. The conservatives assert that “the personal is political,” a slogan that has increasingly come to mean that all personal behavior is subject to political judgment, that there are now feminist rules both men and women should obey. Accordingly, feminism, insofar as it deals with personal life, has largely abandoned politics, which seeks to affect social structures, for moralism, which aims to control individuals.