Ruth Elder breezed into Long Island in September 1927—four months after Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic—with all the subtlety of a gale.

Her colorful sweaters were tight, and her brown hair was bobbed in the latest style. The Alabama native almost never appeared without a rainbow-hued scarf wrapped around her head, pinning back her wild curls. Her airplane was equally eye-catching; the single-engine, Stinson Detroiter monoplane was a brilliant shade of orange. The color choice had less to do with flair than practicality. In a wide expanse of gray-blue ocean, it was easier to spot the floating wreckage of an orange plane than, say, a silver one. And that could prove helpful to Elder. She intended to become the first woman to fly across the ocean, flying this plane—her orange plane—the American Girl.

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“Gas bought, runway ready, plane dandy, pilots OK,” Elder told reporters just after Labor Day at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, the same airstrip where Lindbergh had taken off four months earlier. “Give us a weather break and we’ll take off then.”

Elder—brash and bold, at 24 years old, with her copilot, George Haldeman, at her side—was quickly the talk of New York. But she wasn’t alone. Three hundred miles up the coast, another woman was waiting as well for the weather to break—with dreams, money and an airplane of her own. Frances Grayson, a self-made real estate agent from New York, had dubbed her hulking seaplane the Dawn because this was a new day, a time for strong women like Grayson to choose their own path. Grayson, 35, also intended to be the first woman to ever fly across the ocean to Europe, hiring two men to fly her there. “The Dawn,” she said, “will awake American women to new efforts and bind closer the women of two continents.”

Elder and Grayson emerged at a unique moment in American history: air fever. In the summer of 1927, stories of daring flights filled newspapers across the country. And radio broadcasters followed the newly minted American hero Lindbergh everywhere as he flew the Spirit of St. Louis in a goodwill tour across America. Now, improbably, came two heroines—Elder and Grayson—elbowing their way into the national conversation. Reporters loved writing about their plans—and their planes. They also enjoyed belittling them every chance they got. They called Grayson “The Flying Matron.” And they doubted whether Elder was truly serious about her trans-Atlantic flight.

“What’s this you’re doing?” one reporter asked her. “Advertising a movie?”

“Oh, no,” Elder replied. “I’m really going to fly to Paris.”

“I would rather give my life to something big and worthwhile,” Grayson argued that fall, “than to live longer and do less.”

Both Elder and Grayson fell short in late 1927. One of them would crash en route after more than 30 hours of flying—only to be saved by a passing ship, a miracle. The other would plunge into the cold waters of the North Atlantic, never to be found again.

But Grayson was right: Even though they didn’t make it across the ocean, Elder and Grayson helped inspire a movement. At a time when many men believed a woman had no business flying—and when government officials would create hurdles such as withholding weather reports to make a hard flight even more difficult—these two female pilots proved that a bold woman could defy rules. Other women were soon following them into the sky and, within months, political pundits were declaring 1928 to be the year of the woman. The American woman was, the New York Times declared, “The New Boss of Politics”—a powerful demographic that could no longer be ignored and, indeed, had to be courted in the months leading up to that year’s all-important November election, pitting Republican Herbert Hoover, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, against Democrat Al Smith, the governor of New York.

Politicians were alarmed. “The seasoned campaigner is a total loss when it comes to the woman voters,” one pundit said. “Of all business men, doctors, merchants, lawyers or thieves—politicians have bothered least with women in the mass. They have not the vaguest idea of what arguments will click in a mind they have never had to examine.”

Women knew it; they knew the men in power were clueless. And angry now, they planned to vote in droves—intent on taking control of their lives and their bodies. They may have won the right to vote in 1920 and voted in 1924, too. But it was 1928—the original year of the woman, 90 years ago this fall—that mothers and wives, widows and young college graduates finally decided they were coming for everything. They were going to win their equal rights and take down the man—any man.

“He has got to get out,” one female candidate for Congress said at the time, “if I have to get him out myself.”

We are living in a similar moment today. More than 200 women have won primaries this year putting them on the ballot this November in the general election for Congress. Female candidates running for U.S. Senate will square off against each other in six races this fall—more than ever before. And a surge of women running in down-ballot races for everything from attorney general to state representative seem poised to change the face—and possibly the tenor—of government in statehouses and legislative chambers across the country.

In a rush to explain this movement, journalists have pointed to previous landmark elections—1992, for example, when female candidates stormed into office and women rushed to the polls, mobilized by the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. But to really understand the moment we are living in now, it’s important to reexamine 1928—and its aftermath. Because “the year of the woman” stories are always too simplistic, a prism that closes too fast. Nothing changes in a year or in a single vote; it’s about what happens next—after the election is won or lost.

In this case—the case of 1928—it’s not even about a woman who took office or the women who would help win the White House for Hoover. It’s about women—lots of women, actually—who, instead, took flight after Elder and Grayson. Emboldened by a singular political moment, they were ready to risk their lives to prove they had the skill and the grit to vie equally with men in any arena, not by running for office, but by sitting in the cockpit of an airplane and competing on the biggest stage of them all at the time—the great American sky.

***

All of it had seemed impossible just a few years earlier. The 19th Amendment—ratified in August 1920—may have given women the right to vote, ending a long, absurd and bitter fight for suffrage. But initially, anyway, it didn’t change much at the ballot box.

In November 1920, more people voted in this country than ever before—and, in some communities, women voted in greater numbers than men. But the female voters often chose male candidates over females, proving, according to one negative dispatch, that women are “not yet anxious to run the show.” Women themselves were frustrated about the results and their inability to form a cohesive voting bloc. One feminist leader called the 1920 presidential election a both “debacle” and a “fiasco.” “Is our suffrage victory to be realized?” she asked. “Or is it to be wasted?”

A study of female voters in Chicago in the mayoral election of 1923 and presidential election of 1924 gave women further reason for concern. One-third of women there reported not voting in either election due to “general indifference.” Ten percent of those who didn’t vote blamed it on “timidity.” And an increasing number of women surveyed reported they didn’t even believe women should have the right to vote. In 1923, 11 percent of women who didn’t vote in Chicago said they didn’t believe in women’s suffrage. In 1924, that percentage, surprisingly, jumped to 13 percent.

Perhaps not surprisingly, major American magazines that year began running stories questioning whether women’s suffrage was a “failure.” And into 1927, literary societies, Kiwanis clubs, YMCAs, and high schools from Brooklyn to Atlanta were holding actual debates about whether suffrage was working for women. At least twice, anti-suffragists were said to have won. Just looking at U.S. laws—actual laws on the books—it was hard to argue that suffrage had made women equal.

At the time, laws still forbade women from doing all sorts of things: from filing lawsuits, from serving on juries, from working night shifts, or from even keeping their jobs under ordinary circumstances. In the late 1920s, school boards in many states regularly dismissed women from teaching positions after they got married, believing a married woman couldn’t handle the stress of being both a teacher and a wife.

“I think it is hard for a woman to handle two jobs, like housekeeping and teaching school,” said one proponent of banning married women from classrooms. “Either one engages all of her attention.”

In 1927, however, the cultural world began to shift on its axis. In elementary schools, teachers began to rise up, defending one another against sexist, demeaning rulings that dismissed married women from their classrooms. “We want the best teachers,” one woman demanded in Philadelphia, taking on the school board there, “whether they are married or not.” And just after school started that September—right about this time of year, 90 years ago—Elder and Grayson stood beside their airplanes on the East Coast making their bold declarations.

The press, in some ways, was the least of their problems. Lindbergh—the most famous man in America—didn’t approve of their plans. Officially, anyway, he declined to comment on the women. Then he couldn’t help himself and commented anyway, describing their flights as “rather useless” and lacking “real purpose,” as if anyone had asked him to justify his own groundbreaking journey. The comments stung; people loved Lindbergh in 1927, hanging on his every word. But Elder was especially troubled by the criticism she faced from other women—prominent women.

A leading female sociologist dubbed Elder’s flight “a mistaken thing for a young girl to do.” Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband, Franklin, was soon to run for governor of New York, called Elder’s attempt “very foolish.” And Winifred Sackville Stoner, founder of the League for Fostering Genius, found nothing genius about Elder. The nation, she suggested, would be better off if Elder pursued something more worthwhile. “This afternoon, I am having as my guests at tea a number of high school girls who have won prizes for fast typing,” Stoner said. “Any one of them in being a fast, accurate typist does far more for the community than does a dozen … Ruth Elders.”

“American women believe that a married girl’s place is in the home,” Elder told reporters, fighting back the wave of criticism, “and not in the cockpit of an airplane.” Still, she was going. By attempting to fly the ocean, Elder was defying the expectations and redefining, she said, “the girl’s place in life.”

***

Amelia Earhart agreed. Earhart, a licensed pilot and social worker in Boston, watched in 1927 while Elder and Grayson tried—and failed—to get across the ocean. She was 30 and, by her own admission, she wasn’t doing much flying anymore. But in the spring of 1928, Earhart got a phone call that changed her life. Some wealthy men, including Publisher George Putnam, were looking to put a woman across the ocean. A secret seaplane was waiting in East Boston to make the flight. And Earhart was their first call, simply because they didn’t know another female pilot in Boston. There was just one catch: Earhart wouldn’t be flying the plane herself. She would have to agree to sit behind two men in the cockpit and take notes—as if she were a secretary in some airborne office.

Earhart was not pleased with the arrangement. She had learned to fly planes in 1921, seven years earlier. She knew what she was doing. And she didn’t relish the idea of being, as she put it, “just baggage—like a sack of potatoes,” ferried across the ocean by men. But when their seaplane landed safely off the coast of Wales in June 1928, Earhart became one of the most famous women in the world—and she would use her fame for good. By the end of the summer, she had her own plane and her own plans. Earhart was going to prove she could fly for real.

The homecoming parades had hardly ended for Earhart in New York and Boston that year when women voted in historic numbers for Herbert Hoover. A Quaker and a Republican in favor of Prohibition, he was, according to one description from the campaign trail, “a strong and blameless candidate.” At the very least, Hoover was more appealing than his opponent Al Smith, a Catholic and a Democrat who wished to allow the sale of alcohol once again. With women supporting Hoover, Smith hardly had a chance.

“The woman voter has come into her own for the first time this year,” one Hoover strategist said in the afterglow of the Republican’s victory. “Hereafter she will be a factor to be reckoned with at every stage of a great campaign. She deserves a large part of the credit for Mr. Hoover’s victory.”

In return, women, expected Hoover to push through an equal rights amendment. Feminist leaders had been convinced that Hoover would work to make it happen. And Earhart herself personally lobbied the president after he took office, making perhaps the most compelling case of all. “I know from practical experience,” Earhart said, “of the discriminations that confront women when they enter an occupation where men have priority in opportunity, advancement and protection.”

The equal rights legislation did not pass—not under Hoover, nor under Franklin Roosevelt, who would come next, or other presidents to come. As late as the 1970s, men were still dismissing women’s demands for equal rights. One male critic called it a “lunatic proposal.” After all, he noted, “women do not need special protection.”

But while politicians failed women in the 1920s and 1930s, and the “year of the woman” came and went, female aviators like Earhart kept up the battle for equality in the skies. The political battle was stalled on the ground, but sitting in the cockpits of the same planes men were pushing to their limits, female pilots were proving to skeptics around the world that with equal opportunity a woman could do anything.

In 1929, female pilots—including Earhart and her fellow aviation pioneers Louise Thaden and Ruth Nichols—would fight to be included in the National Air Races and push for their own transcontinental air derby from Santa Monica, Calif., to Cleveland. Race organizers agreed to let them race, but on their terms. Under the proposed rules, each woman would have to be accompanied by a man. And they wouldn’t be allowed to fly across the Rocky Mountains. “It would be too much of a task on the ladies,” one race organizer said, suggesting the women fly to Cleveland from Nebraska or Minnesota.

Thaden, in particular, was furious.

“If this is to be a derby, let’s have it one,” she complained to the other women. “Otherwise, we will be the laughingstock of the aeronautical world. You know—‘Women can’t fly. Can’t navigate. Have to do this and that, in order to do anything.’”

Earhart agreed. And together, America’s prominent female aviators vowed to boycott the races. “None of us will enter,” Earhart told the New York Times. It wasn’t a threat; it was a promise. The men knew it. And it forced them to reconsider. They realized they would look foolish if they staged the first women’s airplane race without the most famous female pilots in the world. The race organizers dropped their absurd rules, and the women earned the right to fly on their own all the way from Santa Monica to Cleveland in August 1929 in what was called National Women’s Air Derby.

The name didn’t last long. By Day Two of the race, the press renamed it the Powder Puff Derby, mocking the women by changing the name. Thaden believed the women needed to be perfect in the race in order to avoid criticism. “One hundred percent perfect,” she said. But being perfect didn’t help—and failing made things worse. When one of the women crashed and died in the desert wastes of Arizona, here came the critics again. Erle Halliburton—the president of a small airline and oil company destined for big things in Oklahoma—blamed the woman for dying. “Women are lacking in certain qualities that men possess,” he said, disregarding the fact that male pilots died in air races all the time. “Handling details essential to safe flying is one of the qualifications women have not mastered successfully.”

He called on the women to stop—to stop racing and stop flying. Earhart just laughed.

“Who is this Halliburton?” she asked. “Who is he to pass judgment on our abilities?”

They were going to keep going. Because, as Earhart said, “we are just getting underway.”

Within two years, she and Ruth Nichols were racing to get across the ocean—solo, this time. None of them would be passengers anymore. And by 1933, the female aviators would begin squaring off against the men—not just each other—in some of the biggest, most celebrated air races of them all.

It did not go well, at first. Men didn’t like the idea of including the women. “If we let them in,” one male pilot complained, “they’ll be in our hair and become pests.” And when one of the women died in September 1933, trying to beat the men at the air races in suburban Chicago, race organizers used it as an excuse to banish all women. No more racing allowed. But the women refused to accept that ruling and they refused to quit, coming back again and again—defiant in the face of rules intended to keep them in their place and confident in the knowledge of who they were.

By 1936, there was still no equal rights amendment, no equal footing for women on the ground. But in the sky, one of the female pilots, Louise Thaden, would beat the men in the most celebrated air race of them all, the Bendix Trophy race—a 14-hour transcontinental air race that one pilot compared to the World Series.

They said a woman couldn’t win it. They said it wasn’t possible. But they were wrong.

“Ladies first!” one woman said in celebration on the ground after the Bendix.

“More power to the women,” said another.

“At last, the races have gone feminine.”

***

The 2018 midterms are no Hoover election, and maybe they aren’t comparable with any other election at all. What’s happening in America—the surge of campaigning women, the obstinacy of the tweeting president, and the wave of anger on both the left and the right—is a political stew without precedent. But there are some notable echoes.

This year, among other things, female aviators are running for office themselves: M.J. Hegar in Texas, a Democrat, U.S. Air Force veteran, and helicopter pilot who served in Afghanistan; Amy McGrath in Kentucky, a Democrat and the first female Marine to fly an F-18 fighter jet in combat; and Rep. Martha McSally in Arizona, a Republican and former fighter pilot running for Jeff Flake’s open Senate seat.

But the 1928 election—and all the other elections hailed by the press as “the year of the woman”—are important reminders that the November election itself isn’t the end of the narrative; it’s more likely the beginning. What happens next, history shows us, will be most interesting. Who’s watching and growing inspired? Who’s waiting and becoming angry? Who will emerge after November’s election, win or lose, to lead, like the women who emerged after 1928?

“My voice doesn’t carry well,” Earhart said once, apologizing to a large audience in New York while trying to address the crowd from a second-story window. She then went downstairs, climbed atop a desk on the sidewalk, and planted her feet on it, speaking as loud as she could, so everyone could hear.

Now, it might seem, is the golden age of female agency—a newly empowered era for women, or something approaching it, a time when cheeky porn stars taunt presidents on Twitter, fed-up movie actresses tell what producers did to them in hotel rooms and restaurant basements, and serial abusers suffer, at long last, some consequences for their acts. Somewhere, as I write this, a once-obscure psychologist named Christine Blasey Ford is asserting her right to tell her story in her own time in her own way—bartering with U.S. senators, staffers and lawyers about exactly how she will testify to her allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school party when she was 15 and he was 17, a charge Kavanaugh denies.

Amid the controversy over Ford’s much-anticipated public appearance tentatively set for this coming week, the precedent often invoked is the moment, almost exactly 27 years ago, when a little-known law professor named Anita Hill appeared before a Senate panel to testify to her own allegations that another conservative Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, had sexually harassed her, a charge that Thomas, too, denied. If you are looking for something to stream this weekend, you could do worse than to watch the full, riveting C-SPAN footage of the Hill-Thomas hearings, in which, for the first time in American history, the august walls of the Senate—and a watching nation—absorbed public talk of things like oral sex and pornography and male entitlement, so shocking then, so drearily familiar now.

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In many ways, the climate for accusers is better in 2018 than it was in 1991. For one thing, there now exist four women on the Senate Judiciary Committee, compared with zero back when Hill appeared, a lone figure with a microphone and a glass of water, in the packed caucus room of the Russell Senate Office Building. Thanks to the courage of victims and the work of reporters, the public attitude toward allegations of sexual assault and harassment has shifted from default skepticism toward cautious willingness to believe. There are more female lawyers, better and smarter preparation for women before they come forward. If nothing else, any victim preparing to talk about harassment or abuse knows, by now, to expect her credibility to be challenged and her morals impugned.

But much, alas, remains strikingly as it was. Some of the senators hearing Ford’s testimony, if she presents it, will be the same men who lined up across from Hill, and ended up confirming the man she said harassed her. Even now, any woman coming forward, particularly in an environment so charged and partisan, knows that the fury of an entire (and very furious) political movement will descend upon her. When it comes to a Supreme Court nomination, the stakes—the makeup of the highest court in the land, President Donald Trump’s ability to deliver the conservative court his base desires—are unimaginably high. Point being: Even now, even given the remarkable climate-change wrought by the #MeToo moment, we are seeing in real time how women can be intimidated by everything from the attacks they face to the constrictions placed on how they can tell their stories.

Any woman, like Ford, voicing allegations in such a pressure-cooker setting must know that her participation will be judged, that it will show up in her obituary someday, unbidden, as part of her life story—and part of the story of the nation. If you don’t believe that, ask Anita Hill, whose testimony altered her life’s course and exposed her in ways she couldn’t have imagined. Yet, that testimony has also stood the test of time. All those years ago, she foretold truths about human behavior that would not be fully acknowledged for a quarter-century.

***

To refresh the memory: In 1991, Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated to take the seat of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He underwent an unremarkable Senate confirmation process—until a report was leaked to the media showing that Anita Hill, a University of Oklahoma law professor, had told FBI investigators that Thomas had made uninvited sexual comments when she worked for him at two different government agencies. In the ensuing uproar, hearings were re-opened, and Hill, who said she never intended to go public, came forward to deliver sworn testimony. The upshot was one of the most gripping Senate hearings ever, as a 35-year-old African-American woman sat at a green-draped table before an all-white, all-male panel and calmly enumerated her charges. Watching the hearings today, you notice right away what hasn’t changed. Why, there is Democratic Senator Joe Biden, his hair not yet white, chairing the committee. There is a youthful Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the man who chairs it today. And there in a pinstriped shirt is Orrin Hatch, another Republican who dismissed the Hill charges as “scurrilous” and has now said, dismissively, of Ford that she must be “mistaken” about Kavanaugh.

After some oddly mesmerizing footage of the 14 senators whispering and shuffling papers as they await her arrival, Hill enters the hearing room wearing a double-breasted turquoise suit featuring the shoulder pads so many working women wore back in 1991—literal as well as metaphorical armor designed to mimic the silhouette of a man, at a time when we thought doing so might be helpful. Wearing a stoic demeanor and just the right hint of fuchsia lipstick, Hill swears to tell the truth, sits down, cranes toward the microphone and begins speaking, saying, “Mr. Chairman.” She is immediately interrupted, as Biden tells the officers of the Senate to make sure the doors remain closed while she delivers her statement. It is a small moment, but telling. These days, the experience of being interrupted is all too familiar to many women, who, if they have read Lean In or any of a zillion studies about women and work, well know that women are interrupted more than men.

Back in 1991 Hill, polite and unperturbed, merely started over. “My name is Anita F. Hill,” she says in the footage, in a voice rich with conviction but also with suppressed emotion. “My childhood was one of a lot of hard work and not much money,” she tells the committee, explaining that she was born on a farm in Oklahoma, the youngest in a family of 13 kids. She talks about her Baptist faith; about going to Oklahoma State University and law school at Yale; taking a job with a private firm in Washington, but wanting to do work that felt, to her, more fulfilling and socially useful. In 1981, a colleague introduced her to Clarence Thomas, who was soon appointed assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, and invited her to come along as his attorney adviser.

What she said next is (we know now) straight out of the Sexual Harassment 101 handbook. Hill assumed—as women do—that the job offer was based on merit. “I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment,” she said in the hearing. Within three months, however, Thomas began to chip away at that happy notion, pressuring her to go out with him and drawing pushback from Hill, who thought it was inappropriate and told him so. Her boss, she alleged, continued to press her, and sought private opportunities to discuss his sexual prowess and his porn-watching habits, describing films involving group sex, rape and women having sex with animals. Hill, she says, was horrified. She told him the talk made her uncomfortable and would try to “change the subject,” a textbook response to such a skin-crawling situation. All this, Hill was forced to utter at a time when the American public was not yet inured to primetime talk of salacious sexual details, nor had any idea what it cost a woman to relive those moments of disgust and degradation. “It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and a number of sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends,” Hill said, continuing, “Telling the world is the most difficult experience of my life, but it is very close to having to live through the experience that occasioned this meeting.”

In the years that followed, much was made of the fact that Hill was obliged to testify before a committee of only men, sitting there in their coats and ties—a “manel” before the phrase was coined. But it was more than just any manel. Flanking Biden on one side was Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, whose illustrious family—let’s be honest—includes men who have done as much damage to women as they have done good for the country, with offenses including serial infidelity, an affair with a babysitter and even deaths, including that of Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned when Kennedy drove a car off a bridge. Kennedy and his pal, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, were notorious for alcohol-infused misbehavior that, by one account, included a game of “waitress toss,” which is just what it sounds like.

On the other side of Biden sat Strom Thurmond, the bespectacled ranking minority member, stroking his pomaded hair and looking impassive as Hill talked about how humiliated she felt by Thomas’ alleged treatment. In addition to being a segregationist and racist, Thurmond was a known sexual harasser (“in the category of his own,” as NPR’s Cokie Roberts would later put it, describing the time he kissed her on the mouth at a political convention)—something everybody in the Senate accepted because, well, that was Strom, and he was awfully, you know, old. A few years after this hearing, one of the women elected in the wave of outrage that followed Thomas’ confirmation, Senator Patty Murray, would get in an elevator with Thurmond, who groped her breast—assuming, presumably, that she was just another intern or staffer and asserting what he considered his droit de seigneur. A newly arrived Republican Senator Susan Collins would take the stairs to avoid getting in the senators’ elevator with Thurmond, despite the fact that she was his peer and entitled to ride it. A colleague would notice—and laugh.

These, then, were the sages listening as Hill articulated the kind of agony and self-doubt felt by the many actresses, software engineers, producers and journalists whose collective experience would emerge during the cascade of #MeToo allegations: A powerful man will take your ambition, your hopes, your self-respect, your intelligence, your trust, and he will use them to his own purposes. “It was almost as though he wanted me at a disadvantage,” Hill reflected under questioning. She understood that it wasn’t sex he was after, necessarily, but the ability to make her vulnerable. At the time, few recognized that what Thomas allegedly did to Hill was classic predator-boss behavior. She described how she had tried to stand up for herself—apparently lacking confidence that she could approach, say, a human resources professional to handle things for her. In this, her behavior remains true of most employees: According to a 2016 study by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, even now, the least common response to harassment is to take action by reporting it or filing a complaint. The study notes that the most common responses are to avoid the harasser, downplay the gravity of what happened, or “attempt to ignore, forget or endure the behavior.” The reason? People who are harassed, the report says, fear disbelief, inaction, blame or retaliation. Exactly what Hill says she did and experienced.

For a time, Hill said, Thomas’ behavior abated. In 1982, when her boss took over as chair of none other than the EEOC, he invited her to follow him, and she did, something the committee would home in on as suspiciously career-minded—but which we also know, now, is common. “I needed the job,” Hill explained. There was no permanent slot for her at the Department of Education, which President Ronald Reagan wanted to abolish, and she wanted to continue working in civil rights. Not only did her boss allegedly resume his behavior, but it got weirder. He talked about his penis size, his penchant for oral sex. In one of the most startling allegations, Hill said that at one point Thomas got a can of Coke and asked who had put “pubic hair” on it. After this, pubic hair became a kind of national running joke, at a time when an ordinary American might have had a hard time believing a grown man, and an accomplished one, would fixate on such a strange and graphic detail. Now, it’s unsurprising to read allegations of men doing all kinds of strange and graphic things: masturbating into a potted plant, asking a victim to watch him take a shower, locking a woman in his office and raping her.

During her testimony, Hill talked about the toll this took. Thomas, she said, began to exhibit displeasure, and she worried she would lose her job. In February 1983, she said, she was hospitalized for stomach pain she attributed to stress. She began to look for a job and found a teaching position at Oral Roberts University. After that, when people would say admiring things about Thomas, she would murmur something agreeable but non-committal. The committee grilled her on this—how could she have agreed? How could she have had even infrequent contact with Thomas in later years, by, say, phoning to pass along messages from others? She explained that to tell the world about Thomas would gain her nothing and cost her much. “I could not afford to antagonize a person in such a high position,” she said, summarizing the predicament of so many working women. There was not yet an #IBelieveHer hashtag. There were not yet hashtags at all. She was in this largely alone. The ordeal would ruin her career in government—she was effectively run out of public service.

The committee did not, at the time, understand that these things are stock behavior. What it did do was ask her to repeat some of the most painful details. Biden wanted to hear the Coke-can-pubic-hair story again. He asked her which incident was the most embarrassing. When she said it was when Thomas talked about the pornography showing large-breasted women having sex with people and animals, Republican Senator Arlen Specter took this opportunity to tell Hill that “breasts” is an ordinary word. “This is not too bad,” he mansplained at a time when mansplaining was not yet a known concept. She stood up for herself: “It wasn’t just the breasts; it was the continuation of his story about what happened in those films with the people with this characteristic, physical characteristic.”

Specter asked her why she had not given every last detail she was sharing in the hearing room—such as the Coke-can episode—to the FBI agents who had interviewed her before the hearing, and whose report, according to the White House, had exonerated Thomas. One agent was female, one was male. “I was very uncomfortable talking to the FBI agent about that,” Hill said. “I am very uncomfortable now.” Specter wanted to know why she had not asked the male agent to leave. He wanted to know why she hadn’t filed a complaint against her boss, Thomas—when Specter could equally well have asked why there wasn’t a better HR department at the EEOC, of all places, to make sure she felt supported. He wanted to know instead why she did not handle all of this by herself, ousting the head of the whole commission. In her response, Hill did what women often do—blamed herself. “I may have shirked a duty,” she said. “I am very sorry that I did not do something or say something.” At the time, there was not yet a vast body of social-science literature on women’s tendency to over-apologize.

Hill was pilloried for coming forward. Conservative (at the time) writer David Brock called her “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” (a jeer he would later recant). She was accused of having a “fantasy” about Thomas; of being spurned by him; of making it all up. There are still people who don’t believe her. I did then, and always have. There is a deeply moving moment after Hill delivers her opening statement, when the hearing doors are opened and her family enters the ornate caucus room. Biden wants them to be able to sit near her. She warns him, “It is a very large family, senator.” Chairs are procured, and her elderly mother and father come to sit near her, along with siblings, lining up, filing in, bending down, hugging her. She hugs them back, gracefully and gratefully. It is hard to imagine why a woman would endure what she did, if it were not true, and why her family would travel to show their support and love.

***

These days, Christine Blasey Ford’s experience feels slightly different from that of Anita Hill. Ideologues haven’t coined the same sexist epithets. As of this writing, the organized defense of Kavanaugh seemed to entail inviting people, including women, to testify to his character, rather than to impugn hers. Women often do feel more empowered: Stormy Daniels is lobbing her saucy tweets in the direction of the White House; the women of Silicon Valley have formed advocacy groups to make the tech industry friendlier to them; Hollywood actresses are launching defense funds for hotel workers and lower-income women. Everybody knows, now, that pornography is a major industry. Men have been suspended, fired, charged criminally, even convicted for harassment and assault; in some cases, women have been promoted into their places.

Then again, the digital age brings new peril for victims coming forward. Ford has been the target of unfounded internet rumors—about her career, her family, her politics—and now, having received death threats, has had to vacate her house. President Trump, having managed to restrain himself for five days, sounded an awful lot like the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 when he blew the why-didn’t-she-come-forward-sooner whistle on Twitter on Friday: “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.” An aide for the now 84-year-old Orrin Hatch was among those hyping what turned out to be a conspiracy-laden Twitter thread insinuating that Ford had simply mixed up Kavanaugh for another classmate at that high school party. (“Zero chance,” Ford corrected; the Hatch staffer took back his support for the author of the conspiracy theory.)

It is noteworthy that the Senate Judiciary Committee is encouraging Ford to speak, and that it now includes female members, though all are Democrats. There has never been a female Republican on the committee, ever. But even many of the Republican senators who seem sympathetic to Ford have said, essentially, “Now or never.” Even when there is more support for women and even when they are invited to speak up, Ford’s predicament—having to discuss a long-held personal trauma on a timetable mostly determined by the forces of American politics—shows why it is still hard to come forward. Ford suffered for decades from what she says happened to her as a young teenager. There are notes from her therapist corroborating what she went through, and the very fact that she was talking about it in counseling, so many years later, shows the lasting toll these assaults take, the scars they leave, the pain that comes with unearthing and sharing those memories.

If there is one note of hope in the whole mess, it is this: Much as Hill’s reputation was smeared in 1991, there are women, and men, who would argue today that she is an exemplar. For me, she is up there with Rosa Parks: courageous, staunch, calm, not to be moved. Rewatching the hearings is like rereading Anna Karenina and realizing, once more, how brilliant it is—and for different reasons than you perceived the first time. She was there to prophecy, articulating patterns of behavior that much of the rest of the country would take decades to pinpoint and understand. For the same reason, I would hope that Ford, having come this far, would indeed face the klieg lights and testify, as she has said she intends to—tell her story on the record to be understood and reflected upon, visited and revisited.

It will not be easy. History will judge her, and that is a lot for a private individual to reckon with—one who will not benefit regardless of the outcome. But I hope that the fact that it’s 2018, not 1991, means more people will watch, consider and take seriously what Ford might say. We have, after all, heard this song before. Perhaps this time we will listen.