A women's history report card on Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential primary campaign, 2008.

HOW CAN WE BEST PLACE Hillary Clinton's primary campaign in historical perspective--what were its precedents and what might unfold from it (1)? Of course it's impossible to speak about her candidacy without also thinking about Barack Obama's--and once you start thinking about gender and race, can class be far behind?

Future historians might agree that her campaign revolved around three questions. First, on the "woman question," Clinton's candidacy built on the gradual change that took place over two generations since 1930: she consolidated those changes into a permanent base for women presidential candidates in the future. Second, on the "race question," Clinton's campaign reminds us of the historic precedent of 1869 in which white women competed with black men for the right to vote. Her example shows that future women candidates for president--black or white--need to seek an alternative precedent for white feminists' history on the race question. Third, Clinton's campaign prompts us to ask the "gender question" as well as the "woman question" and the "race question"--and ask questions about the relationship between gender and class. Why has gender remained so prominent in American politics and class so submerged in the past half century? How might the gender question be answered differently in the future?

On the "woman question," I agree with Katha Pollitt who wrote in the Nation on June 6, "Thank you, Hillary, for opening the door for other women." Pollitt thought that "Because [Clinton] normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can't stand her." (2)

The history of women presidential candidates has been helpfully summarized by Jo Freeman's recent book, We Will Be Heard: Women's Struggles for Political Power in the United States. She notes that although two women put themselves forward for the presidency in the nineteenth century (Victoria Woodhull and Belva Lockwood), none did so in the twentieth century before 1964, when Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine became a candidate. Then a profusion of women candidates appeared. Between 1964 and 2004 over fifty women were on at least one ballot as candidates for president, both as minor party candidates and as candidates in primaries for the nomination of the Republican of Democratic parties. But only a few of these were noticed by the national press, most notably Shirley Chisholm in 1972. One of the four founders of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, Chisholm often said of her twenty years in local politics in Brooklyn, "I...met far more discrimination because I am a woman that because I am black." Of all the women who ran for president in the twentieth century, Chisholm got the most votes. Four hundred thousand people voted for her in 14 Democratic primaries. On the first ballot at the Democratic convention, she got 152 delegate votes. No woman since has done as well. Freeman charted changes in public opinion polls from 1930 to 1990. In 1937 only a third of respondents were willing to vote for a woman for president. By 1945 that figure grew to 50 percent. In 1972 (elevated by the Second Wave) it grew to 70 percent. And in 1990 it reached 90 percent, where it has stayed (3). So when Hillary Clinton's candidacy emerged in 2006, it built on 70 years of gradual change in public opinion with regard to women candidates for president.

But, of course, her candidacy was about more than "the woman question." Race too was deeply involved. And on this question Clinton failed to establish a path for future white women candidates. Her claim that more hard-working "white" Americans were voting for her exemplified her effort to use race to her advantage in ways that forever tarnished her reputation. (4)

What was she thinking?

Perhaps the historic precedent of 1869 was in her mind, or she had forgotten its lessons, or she never knew this history. That iconic moment shaped the woman suffrage movement for decades thereafter and has usually been interpreted as pitting the suffrage of white women against black men. But if we step back and look at the broader context of that moment, we see that its origins in 1837 offer a more useable past for future women presidential candidates.