Barbara Boxer credits Anita Hill for her first Senate win. And the wins of other women.

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/hbo-confirmation-barbara-boxer-anita-hill-1201743590/

On Thursday, Kerry Washington joined her real-life counterpart in the movie, Anita Hill, for a premiere screening on the Paramount lot. Thomas’s 1991 confirmation appeared to be sailing through the Senate, until Hill, a law professor, gave 11th hour testimony to the male-only Judiciary Committee alleging that the Supreme Court nominee had made unwanted advances and sexually graphic remarks when they previously worked together.

Thomas, played by Wendell Pierce, was confirmed, but the outrage over the hearings is what led the next year to the Year of the Woman, said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who attended the screenings. Four women were elected in 1992, including Boxer and Dianne Feinstein in California.

“If it wasn’t for Anita Hill, I would not have won my Senate race,” Boxer told Variety, adding that the Thomas-Hill confirmation battle will be featured in her memoirs, coming out in June. “We got elected by this woman’s courage.”

“To me, I think the overwhelming power of the film is just how much courage it took her to stick with it,” Boxer said. “The taunting, the way she was treated by my colleagues in the Senate. You are a woman scorned. What is that about? And her treatment was so terrible and it was brought out in the film.”

Boxer was in the House of Representatives in 1991, and was among a group of women lawmakers who are portrayed in the movie marching to the Senate and bursting into the Senate dining room to demand that the Judiciary Committee reopen the Thomas confirmation hearings to demand that they be reopened.

SNIP