Lynn Yeakel, Spurred Into Politics by Anita Hill, Dies at 80

For a quick interval in 1992, Lynn Yeakel carried the hope of many American girls on her shoulders.

Whereas watching the 1991 Supreme Court docket affirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, she was amongst hundreds of thousands of people that had been outraged by the best way the Senate Judiciary Committee handled Anita Hill, a legislation professor who had accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment.

The optics of the all-male, all-white committee grilling a Black girl and roughly dismissing her grievance about sexual harassment — not a broadly acknowledged dynamic on the time — drove a number of girls to run for workplace in what pundits known as the “Yr of the Lady.”

Ms. Yeakel (pronounced YAY-kul), a Pennsylvania Democrat who had by no means run for workplace earlier than, was amongst them.

She took on Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, whose aggressive interrogation of Ms. Hill in the course of the hearings, which riveted the nation, put him on the prime of the record of males whom girls voters most needed to defeat.

“If it hadn’t been for these hearings,” Ms. Yeakel informed The New York Occasions in 1992, “it by no means would have occurred to me to run towards Arlen Specter.”

In the long run, she got here up quick. Nonetheless, she had caught the zeitgeist of a selected second in historical past. As she informed WHYY radio, in Philadelphia, she believed these hearings could be seen on reflection as a turning level for ladies in searching for political energy and standing up for his or her rights.

Ms. Yeakel died on Jan. 13 at a medical heart in Fort Myers, Fla. She was 80. The trigger was issues of a blood most cancers, stated her husband, Paul Yeakel. They lived in Rosemont, Pa., and had a second residence in Florida.

Ms. Yeakel had been a longtime advocate for ladies’s rights and a fund-raiser for ladies’s charities however was largely unknown to the general public when she challenged Mr. Specter, a former Philadelphia district legal professional and two-term incumbent.

By no means having run for workplace, she barely registered within the polls. However in the course of the Democratic major, she ran a startling TV spot. It confirmed footage of Mr. Specter questioning Ms. Hill; Ms. Yeakel then stops the footage and asks the viewer, “Did this make you as indignant because it made me?”

She was the shock winner of the five-way major, incomes 45 % of the vote and changing into an in a single day sensation. She initially led Mr. Specter within the polls by 15 share factors.

However Mr. Specter discovered his footing. He raised greater than twice as a lot cash as she did. He expressed some contrition for his remedy of Ms. Hill, saying he understood why her grievance towards Justice Thomas “touched a uncooked nerve amongst so many ladies.”

And he ran an aggressive marketing campaign. He questioned Ms. Yeakel’s competence. He criticized her husband for belonging to a rustic membership that had by no means had a Black member. And he criticized her father, a former member of Congress from Virginia, for his votes towards civil rights.

Ms. Yeakel famous that Mr. Specter was specializing in the boys in her life, not on her, however he erased her lead. In the long run, he beat her by three share factors.

Lynn Moore Hardy was born on July 9, 1941, in Portsmouth, Va. Her father, Porter Hardy Jr., a businessman, was a Democratic member of Congress from 1947 to 1968. Her mom, Lynn (Moore) Hardy, was a schoolteacher.

Lynn grew up in Virginia and went to Randolph-Macon Lady’s Faculty (now Randolph Faculty) in Lynchburg, Va. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1963 with a significant in French literature. A lot later, in 2005, she earned a grasp’s diploma in administration from the American Faculty of Monetary Providers in King of Prussia, Pa.

Earlier than she ran for the Senate, Ms. Yeakel was a co-founder and chief govt of Girls’s Method, one of many first and largest fund-raising coalitions devoted to the development of ladies and women.

After her Senate bid, she ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1994. President Invoice Clinton appointed her that 12 months to be the Mid-Atlantic regional director for the Division of Well being and Human Providers.

Ms. Yeakel later joined Drexel College in Philadelphia because the director of its medical school’s Institute for Girls’s Well being and Management. There, she established the Girls One Award and Scholarship Fund, which offers scholarships for medical college students from underrepresented communities.

At Drexel, she additionally established Imaginative and prescient 2020, now known as Imaginative and prescient Ahead. Its purpose is to assist girls obtain social, financial and political equality with males.

She married Paul M. Yeakel in 1965. Along with her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Courtney; her son, Paul Jr.; and 6 grandchildren.