OPINION — This was the point. This was always the point of the “Year of the Woman,” in 1992 and every election year since then. To have women at the table, to have women as a part of the process in the government we live by every day. Women still aren’t serving in Congress in the numbers they should be, but it is at moments like this one — with a nominee, an accusation, and a Supreme Court seat in the balance — where electing women to office matters.

When Anita Hill told an all-male panel of senators in 1991 that Clarence Thomas had repeatedly sexually harassed her when she had worked with him years before, the senators on the all-male Judiciary Committee seemed to put Hill on trial instead of Thomas. Why didn’t she quit her job and get another one, they asked. Why did she speak to him again? Why didn’t she come forward and say something about Thomas sooner if he was such a flawed nominee?

Without a woman on that committee, real justice for Anita Hill seemed impossible to the millions of women across the country watching it unfold. The next year, those same women voted and sent women to Washington in record numbers to change the face of Congress.

One of the women elected was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who 27 years later is the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee deciding the fate of Judge Brett Kavanaugh in his path to the Supreme Court. Seemingly on a glide path to the court as late as last week, Kavanaugh now stands accused of attempted rape by professor Christine Blasey Ford. She has described an incident from a time more than 35 years ago when she and Kavanaugh were both drinking at a high school party, but where he was “stumbling drunk.” Ford said she never spoke of the event until marriage counseling decades later, but went to The Washington Post in July when Kavanagh seemed to be on the short list for the high court.

Watch: If Kavanaugh Lied to Committee That Would Be “Disqualifying,” Collins Says