Dear Dr Christine Blasey Ford

I am writing to thank you. No matter how harrowing your experience, no matter what the US Senate does in the weeks to come, you have achieved something profound in its power and impact, something that benefits all of us. For there are two arenas in which your words will reverberate – the Senate, and the immeasurably vast realm of public discourse and societal values. Even if your words, like Anita Hill’s, are discounted in the former, they will echo in the latter for a long time to come.

You said at the outset of this ordeal: “I was … wondering whether I would just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway, and that I would just be personally annihilated.” Testifying in front of that audience, made up in no small part of hostile, disbelieving supporters of the man you told them assaulted you, may have felt like annihilation. Going into your deepest trauma in front of the nation must have been a harsh ordeal. But you were not annihilated; you were amplified in all senses of the word.

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Sexual assault denies a victim her voice, the right to say no and have it mean anything. Your account of his hand clamped over your mouth makes this experience of being silenced a direct assault. A society that then refuses to hear a survivor, that denies her the ability to testify to her own experience, that creates a pervasive hostility that prevents victims from coming forward, erases her and them and us again. But on Thursday you had a voice that rang out across the world, and you used it to defend this country against a man not just unfit to be a judge but antithetical to what a judge should be: honest, reliable, calm, evenhanded, respectful of the rights of others. Your voice may have shaken, but your truth went marching on.

Anita Hill lost by one linear measure: she did not prevent Clarence Thomas from being appointed to a position for which he remains manifestly unfit. But what she did achieve was not merely linear; her impact, like her voice, spread in all directions. She prompted a searching national conversation about sexual harassment that was desperately needed and that had consequences that benefited tens or hundreds of millions of women in this country and will benefit the generations to come as they enter the workplace. She made an adjustment in the unequal distribution of power –not so grand an adjustment that the problem was remedied, but a shift that matters.

Play Video 3:24 'I believed he was going to rape me,' Ford tells Senate panel – video

She did so by being, like you, a steadfast witness to her own experience. Many in the media and some in the Senate maliciously insisted on treating her – but not Thomas – as a subjective, unreliable, perhaps delusional, perhaps vindictive person, yet she could not be dissuaded by them.

As you must know better than most of us from your profession of psychology, credibility – being considered a person who should be believed – is foundational to one’s standing as a member of a family, of a university, of a workplace, of a society. Anita Hill’s testimony and the Senate response put out in the open how women are stripped of this basic power, right, and equality, or are assumed to be incapable or unworthy of it in the first place.

In the wake of Anita Hill’s testimony, a vast collective conversation about workplace harassment opened up. Those who had not experienced it directly – at least those who were willing to hear – learned how pervasive and insidious it is and why women don’t report it (even recent statistics show how often the consequences for reporting are punitive). Reporting of such harassment increased dramatically, meaning far more targeted women were able to recognize their mistreatment or tried to find remedies.

The seldom remembered Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed “to provide appropriate remedies for intentional discrimination and unlawful harassment in the workplace”, especially when employers use “a particular employment practice that causes a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”. And the next year the federal election became known as “the year of the woman”, because more women ran for office and won than ever before. The shockwaves of her testimony rippled outward in all directions.

It is too soon to measure the consequences of your testimony, Dr Ford, though there have been endless media assertions that this confrontation between you and Judge Kavanaugh was a test of #Me Too (even the headlines put on one of my essays framed it that way). There are so many problems with that framework.

Play Video 0:41 Ford talks about the moments she cannot forget from the night of the incident - video

One is that #Me Too is only one fruitful year in a project for the rights and equality of women that goes back more than 50 years by one measure, almost 180 by others. Another is that what all this has sought to change is patriarchy, an institution that is thousands of years old. The test of our success is in the remarkable legal and cultural shifts we have achieved over the past 50 years, not whether or not we have changed everyone and everything in the past year. That we have not changed everything does not diminish that we have changed a lot.

The word “we” raises other questions. There is not a “we” in this situation. There are many. There are those who have engaged with the news, the conversation, and the literature to understand how pervasive the problem of sexual violence and violence against women is. There are those who are survivors of sexual assault and other kinds of gendered violence – and we are legion – who know all this in visceral ways. And there is another we that insists on not recognizing the problem, who have chosen not to listen to the endless supply of stories. This is one of the huge fissures running through this country and society.

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“Bravery is contagious,” said Senator Leahy at the outset of your testimony. “You sharing your story is going to have a lasting permanent impact … We owe you a debt of gratitude.” You have opened up space for tens or hundreds of thousands of others to tell stories that need to be told and that others need to hear. Sexual assault thrives on the silence of its victims, and these past weeks have shattered some of those silences. There is a geological term, punctuated equilibrium, that proposes the Earth evolves, not steadily, but with long uneventful intervals ruptured by epochal change. Feminism too has its punctuated equilibrium, and the response to the Anita Hill hearing in 1991 and to many ugly events in recent years have been ruptures that changed the social landscape. You are yourself a welcome earthquake.

You have, by telling your own story with wrenching vividness, opened up space for countless voices to be heard, for many to tell their own stories for the first time, for the balance to again shift a little. You did not want this role, but when you felt it necessary you came forward and you spoke. And for that, you are the hero of millions. I hope that despite the threats and attacks, you can feel how significant that is, and that you know that the threats and attacks are happening because what you do matters so much. One of the two women who confronted Senator Jeff Flake on the elevator, in the now-famous video, asked him a question about Kavanaugh: “Can he hold the pain of the country and repair it? Because that is the work of justice.” It seems clear to many of us that he cannot, and that in some way you already have. I know I speak for millions when I say thank you.

• Rebecca Solnit is the author of Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions