Now we live in a world where men who were hoping to hand over their business to the next generation, or maybe have a doctor in the family, look at their new baby girl without a shred of disappointment. I saw all this happen, and it knocks me out whenever I think about it.

But it's a revolution still in the making. The struggle for equal opportunity is far from over, and men haven't all adapted to the presence of women at the next desk, in the conference room or driving together to the big meeting in Dayton.

Some are lecherous bosses who think their power gives them a version of the right of the old lords to sample the favors of every girl in the neighborhood. Some are otherwise nice people under the deeply mistaken impression they're so attractive no woman would mind a surprise hand up her skirt.

It was inevitable that sooner or later, we'd need to go through a huge social trauma that would firmly establish the new rules. And here we are. We've had three resignations from Congress this week. (One involved a lawmaker asking female staff members if they'd act as a surrogate mother. Try to imagine a female representative inquiring whether men in the office want to be sperm donors.) There are sexual harassment crises in state legislatures from Alaska to Florida. The entertainment and communications worlds are rocking.

"This is our moment," said Representative Jackie Speier, the San Francisco Democrat who's been one of the leaders of the anti-harassment forces in Congress.

The moment won't really have arrived until the same thing is happening everywhere from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to fast-food franchises. But it's a start.

"It does feel like a tipping point," said Estelle Freedman, a Stanford University historian who's written extensively about the way earlier generations of American men cheerfully recast rape as "seduction" and sexual harassment on the streets as "mashing."

The critical combination, Freedman said, was a new ethos combined with the movement of women into positions of power. Franken was forced out of the Senate because there were women senators who could lead the call for him to go. "And it was women journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein story," Freedman noted. "All these strains are coming together."