For a quick interval in 1992, Lynn Yeakel carried the hope of many American girls on her shoulders.
Whereas watching the 1991 Supreme Courtroom affirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, she was amongst thousands and thousands of people that have been outraged by the way in which 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 lady and kind of dismissing her criticism about sexual harassment — not a extensively acknowledged dynamic on the time — drove a number of girls to run for workplace in what pundits referred to as the “12 months of the Girl.”
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 through the hearings, which riveted the nation, put him on the high of the record of males whom girls voters most wished 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.”
Ultimately, she got here up brief. 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 girls in looking for political energy and standing up for his or her rights.
Ms. Yeakel died on Jan. 13 at a medical middle 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 house in Florida.
Ms. Yeakel had been a longtime advocate for girls’s rights and a fund-raiser for girls’s charities however was largely unknown to the general public when she challenged Mr. Specter, a former Philadelphia district lawyer and two-term incumbent.
By no means having run for workplace, she barely registered within the polls. However through the Democratic main, 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 offended because it made me?”
She was the shock winner of the five-way main, incomes 45 p.c 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 criticism 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. Ultimately, 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 Girl’s School (now Randolph School) in Lynchburg, Va. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1963 with a serious in French literature. A lot later, in 2005, she earned a grasp’s diploma in administration from the American School of Monetary Companies in King of Prussia, Pa.
Earlier than she ran for the Senate, Ms. Yeakel was a co-founder and chief government of Girls’s Method, one of many first and largest fund-raising coalitions devoted to the development of girls and ladies.
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 Companies.
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 gives scholarships for medical college students from underrepresented communities.
At Drexel, she additionally established Imaginative and prescient 2020, now referred to as Imaginative and prescient Ahead. Its aim 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.
Supply: NY Times