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

For a brief period in 1992, Lynn Yeakel carried the hope of many American women on her shoulders.

While watching the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, she was among millions of people who were outraged by the way the Senate Judiciary Committee treated Anita Hill, a law professor who had accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment.

The optics of the all-male, all-white committee grilling a Black woman and more or less dismissing her complaint about sexual harassment — not a widely acknowledged dynamic at the time — drove several women to run for office in what pundits called the “Year of the Woman.”

Ms. Yeakel (pronounced YAY-kul), a Pennsylvania Democrat who had never run for office before, was among them.

She took on Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, whose aggressive interrogation of Ms. Hill during the hearings, which riveted the nation, put him at the top of the list of men whom women voters most wanted to defeat.

“If it hadn’t been for those hearings,” Ms. Yeakel told The New York Times in 1992, “it never would have occurred to me to run against Arlen Specter.”

In the end, she came up short. Still, she had caught the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history. As she told WHYY radio, in Philadelphia, she believed those hearings would be seen in retrospect as a turning point for women in seeking political power and standing up for their rights.

Ms. Yeakel died on Jan. 13 at a medical center in Fort Myers, Fla. She was 80. The cause was complications of a blood cancer, said her husband, Paul Yeakel. They lived in Rosemont, Pa., and had a second home in Florida.

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

Never having run for office, she barely registered in the polls. But during the Democratic primary, she ran a startling TV spot. It showed footage of Mr. Specter questioning Ms. Hill; Ms. Yeakel then stops the footage and asks the viewer, “Did this make you as angry as it made me?”

She was the surprise winner of the five-way primary, earning 45 percent of the vote and becoming an overnight sensation. She initially led Mr. Specter in the polls by 15 percentage points.

But Mr. Specter found his footing. He raised more than twice as much money as she did. He expressed some contrition for his treatment of Ms. Hill, saying he understood why her complaint against Justice Thomas “touched a raw nerve among so many women.”

And he ran an aggressive campaign. He questioned Ms. Yeakel’s competence. He criticized her husband for belonging to a country club that had never had a Black member. And he criticized her father, a former member of Congress from Virginia, for his votes against civil rights.

Ms. Yeakel noted that Mr. Specter was focusing on the men in her life, not on her, but he erased her lead. In the end, he beat her by three percentage points.

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 mother, Lynn (Moore) Hardy, was a schoolteacher.

Lynn grew up in Virginia and went to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) in Lynchburg, Va. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1963 with a major in French literature. Much later, in 2005, she earned a master’s degree in management from the American College of Financial Services in King of Prussia, Pa.

Before she ran for the Senate, Ms. Yeakel was a co-founder and chief executive of Women’s Way, one of the first and largest fund-raising coalitions dedicated to the advancement of women and girls.

After her Senate bid, she ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1994. President Bill Clinton appointed her that year to be the Mid-Atlantic regional director for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Ms. Yeakel later joined Drexel University in Philadelphia as the director of its medical college’s Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership. There, she established the Women One Award and Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for medical students from underrepresented communities.

At Drexel, she also established Vision 2020, now called Vision Forward. Its goal is to help women achieve social, economic and political equality with men.

She married Paul M. Yeakel in 1965. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Courtney; her son, Paul Jr.; and six grandchildren.