It may well be; wasn't it also true that she was contacted by the committee and was not the initiator? Her testimony was cossetted and coerced by the enemies of the president. I saw her as a basically passive personality who had no background in the male Anglo-Saxon conventions of the recently-opened world of work.
Psycho-babble. My GRANDMOTHER was in the "recently-opened world of work" in 1918. She was a bacteriologist at the Medical College of Georgia. My mother recently retired from a university professorship; she was a professional dancer for 50 years. It has a lot more to do with Ms. Hill, than with the "world of work". And passive-aggressive might be more like it.
She was not the initiator . . . but the way it went was that she had blabbed a lot to friends and word got back to the committee, and they demanded that she testify. Then she was too embarassed to admit that she had embroidered her story beyond all recognition (or switched the principal actor, which seems more likely given her previous job). The Democrats were too eager to trash Justice Thomas and didn't check her dates or corroborating witnesses (which didn't match up). But by that time the snowball had gained too much momentum and too many people were invested in it. So she "had" to perjure herself, and so did her witness.
She should have done what the witness did in the old lawyers' story -- he changed his story in court. The lawyer, embarassed, asked, "Well, Mr. Witness, didn't you meet with me in my office and tell me X, Y, and Z?"
"Well, yeah, I did," replied the witness. "But then, I was just talkin', and now I'm swearin'."