An Army of Voices

If you are a woman, or know somebody who is, it’s safe to assume you have talked about Mr. Weinstein at the dinner table, on the subway, in bed, at work, and any other place where people gather. Perhaps you’ve asked your partner, your mother, your boss or your friend for the first time, as I have, if she, too, is among this strange new tribe. (“Who was your Weinstein?” we all suddenly want to know.)

I’ve heard from women who said they’ve retroactively confronted their harassers and those who enabled them, and from men who are re-examining, perhaps somewhat nervously, their own behavior. The new conversation goes way beyond the workplace to sweep in street harassment, rape culture and “toxic masculinity” — terminology that would have been confined to gender studies classes, not found in mainstream newspapers, not so long ago.

“In the women’s movement of the 1970s we had this phrase ‘the click moment,’” Barbara Berg, a historian and the author of the 2009 book “Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future,” said. “This is the click moment. It’s like, ‘Enough.’ And then there’s a snowball effect: Once you see women speaking truth to power and not being told, ‘This is just what you have to put up with,’ then it encourages other women to stand up.”

With Mr. Weinstein, the accusers were on the record, poised, and more of them seem to emerge each day, so no individual had to bear the burden alone, as Professor Hill had. “When you have Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow in the same sentence, well, people take note,” the sociologist Michael Kimmel said.