These Congresswomen protested Clarence Thomas. Here's what they're doing about Kavanaugh.

Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro recently repeated, almost verbatim, a speech to Congress — one she originally made 27 years ago, during the height of the debate over Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation.

“How can there be a vote to place Judge Thomas in a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court under this cloud?” DeLauro, then a freshman lawmaker serving her first year in Congress, began her one-minute speech on the House floor in 1991. She was referring to the Senate barreling toward a final vote on Thomas that evening, even as Anita Hill brought forward explosive allegations of sexual harassment against the federal judge.

With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in similar turmoil over accusations of sexual assault, DeLauro rose on the House floor again Friday to give the exact same speech, only substituting the names of Kavanaugh for Thomas and Christine Blasey Ford, who riveted the country last week with her searing testimony. DeLauro was just one of many Democratic women and female activists who oppose — or at least want to slow down — Kavanaugh’s confirmation. And just like she and her female colleagues were eventually successful in holding off Thomas’s confirmation vote in 1991 to hear Hill’s testimony, women, once again, played a pivotal role in delaying Kavanaugh’s last week in favor of an FBI investigation.

Back in 1991, however, men almost succeeded in silencing the opposition. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, abruptly cut off DeLauro’s impassioned speech to point out that she’d violated an arcane House rule prohibiting members from discussing the affairs of the Senate. Former Rep. Bob Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania, demanded that her words be stricken from the record and further, that she should be censured for continuing to breach decorum. After 15 long minutes of parliamentary wrangling, DeLauro was finally allowed 28 more seconds to finish her speech.

The image of Hill, in her electric teal power suit, staring down an unsympathetic, all-white panel of men — both Democrats and Republicans — who appeared deeply suspicious of her every assertion is perhaps the most enduring memory from Thomas’s fraught confirmation. Less remembered is how the scant number of women then serving in Congress, urged on by activists, insisted that Hill be heard in the first place.

As DeLauro attempted to convince the Senate to hold off their final vote that afternoon in 1991, a contingent of her fellow Democratic women decided to break off and try an even bolder tack. Seven of them — Reps. Louise Slaughter of New York, Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, Barbara Boxer of California, Jolene Unsoeld of Washington, Patsy T. Mink of Hawaii, Nita M. Lowey of Westchester, and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of D.C. — stormed across the Capitol and up the stairs to the Senate to urge their colleagues to give Hill’s accusations a fair hearing. The moment gave birth to an iconic photo that Slaughter, who passed away earlier this year, called “the female Iwo Jima.”

“We were not going to be turned,” she told the Washington Post in 2017.

“It was the only thing we could do to call attention to our horror that they were plowing ahead in 1991,” Boxer told VICE News. “We did it out of desperation.”

The women marched to the room where Senate Democrats were having their weekly lunch meeting and knocked on the door. They were summarily dismissed and told they could not come in. An aide to then–Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell was dispatched to tell them to wait in Mitchell’s office down the hall.

“The senators were stone-faced,” recalled Rep. Nita Lowey to VICE News. “They had no interest in us. I would think they owed some courtesy to the women of the House to hear our views, but they did not seem to feel that they had that responsibility.”

As the women spent the day lobbying other key senators to delay the vote, female staffers came out of their offices to egg them on.

The women ultimately prevailed. The vote was put on hold and the Senate Judiciary Committee agreed to hear Hill’s testimony three days later. Although the Senate narrowly confirmed Thomas in a 52-48 vote one week later, anger over how Hill was treated ushered in the original “Year of the Woman,” a then record-breaking wave of women running for political office, in 1992.

Today, the country is experiencing a second “Year of the Woman” — even though three times as many women are serving in Congress as there were in 1991. Four sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Democrat ranking member Dianne Feinstein of California, and questioned Kavanaugh themselves. She was first elected in 1992, as part of the mobilization after Hill’s testimony.

This week, many of those who played a role in ensuring Hill was heard in 1991 are closely following every twist and turn of Kavanaugh's proceedings — and wondering whether the Senate as an institution has absorbed the lessons of that year.

“I’m angry. I’m really angry,” DeLauro told VICE News shortly before giving her floor speech Friday.

Nearly three decades have passed, DeLauro said, but the odds continue to be stacked against women who bring forward credible charges against powerful men, especially when the audience is the GOP.

“What I have found on the other side of the aisle is that there is a lack of respect for women and who they are, what their values are, what they believe, and their experiences,” DeLauro said. “There was not one shred of understanding on that side of the aisle by those 11 men [on the Judiciary Committee] that understood the depth of what happened to Dr. Ford. They don’t understand it, and I don’t believe they care.”

Moreover, Democratic women feel men in positions of power still seem more likely to sympathize with the accused perpetrator than a victim.

“It seemed to me that Anita Hill was on trial, and there is some similarity now,” Lowey said. “Dr. Ford was also on trial, and the senators had made up their minds before the hearing had even begun.”

Still, the cultural landscape has undeniably shifted in the last 30 years. Anita Hill, and more recently the revelations and raised consciousness of the #MeToo movement, have given the country a more sophisticated understanding of sexual harassment and abuse, including why many victims don’t come forward to report these crimes. If Congress hasn’t fully internalized those nuances, members are starting to realize there’s a political price to pay for appearing callous.

“They certainly learned not to mistreat a woman before the cameras, but they seem to be needing to relearn lessons that Anita Hill taught so well,” Norton said. “It’s not our numbers that matter. It’s the activism of women in the country and their unwillingness to tolerate allegations of this kind without being sure that those allegations are not true.”

Last week, it was again women who were credited with slowing down what seemed like, only days ago, Kavanaugh’s glide to a Supreme Court seat. The federal judge came under pointed questioning by Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kamala Harris of California. House Democratic women once again marched to the Senate to register their opposition to the nomination. And the anguished protest of two sexual assault survivors, activists Maria Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila, helped convince Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, to press pause on the breakneck speed of the Senate’s proceedings and call for the FBI to reopen its background investigation. After Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine followed suit, the White House capitulated and agreed to a limited, one-week inquiry.

“Without the MeToo movement, without Anita Hill changing us a little bit, and without the Democrats putting four women on the Judiciary Committee, I don’t think we’d be where we are — which is the pause,” Boxer said. “Time is definitely on our side if we want to get to the truth.”

Cover image: Ranking member Rep. Rosa DeLauro D-Conn., questions Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at a House Committee on Appropriation subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)