Her choices and her thinking, all those years before she told her story — they sound familiar. Surely many women her age and older would still respond to those circumstances the way she did, with silence and shame. Certainly, Jessica Leeds, who spoke to The New York Times about an encounter in which she said Trump groped her on a plane, came of age at a time when women were taught, as she put it, “it was our fault.” Trump’s own camp seems to be working hard to perpetuate the kind of thinking that blames the woman: Eric Trump said in August that a “strong, powerful woman” like his sister Ivanka wouldn’t allow sexual harassment to happen to her.

This is not the first time that the subject of a man’s unwanted sexual overtures has emerged unexpectedly from the churning of the political process, and has then come to dominate it.

Fourteen years before Stoynoff’s experience, the law professor Anita Hill testified, during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at, of all places, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The following year, record-breaking numbers of women swept into Congress — many of them, some have argued, supported by women repulsed not only by Hill’s story, but also by the sight of so many white men on the Senate Judiciary Committee grilling Hill, a black woman, about her motives and questioning her character.

If Hill’s single story of sexual harassment had the ultimate effect of galvanizing women, imagine what might happen now that the issue is sexual assault — as numerous women have stepped forward to talk about the way Trump helped himself to their body parts.

The message of Anita Hill’s experience was this: If you don’t think this is important, if you don’t think this happens to women every day, then you don’t get it. In the past few years, an insistence that women’s right to live free of sexual harassment or assault has picked up new energy, as women on campuses have fiercely taken up the cause.