In 1888, the prominent suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker confidently predicted that, “we shall have a women president of the United States before the ballot is given to women.” In 1905, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer told an audience that “before gray hair shall cover the heads of the women here tonight” America would send a woman to the White House.

But the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920; Brewer’s listeners greyed, and then passed. A century later, the election of a woman remains perennially inevitable, perhaps even imminent, and yet somehow unachieved.

Women now occupy a broad range of business, professional, and civic positions. But in politics, as in most other fields, it gets narrower toward the top. Not quite one in three local and county officials is a woman, but only one in four state legislators, one in five members of Congress, one in eight governors. And no presidents.

That may not change. There’s no shortage of reasons for voters to dislike this particular woman—indeed, most do—and presidential elections present binary choices. But even voters marking their ballots for Trump will look at them and see something new. And maybe the chance to vote against a major-party nominee who happens to be a woman is itself a mark of progress, just as much as the chance to vote for her.

Even if Hillary Clinton wins, it wouldn’t bring about a post-gendered American, anymore than Barack Obama’s victory delivered a post-racial America. Indeed, there’s every reason to expect it to produce a wave of open misogyny, as ugly as the racist backlash of the Obama years. It’s Newton’s Third Law of Cultural Politics: Every action creates an entirely disproportionate and opposite reaction.

But for now, at least, misogyny is just one of the varied hatreds and hostilities coursing through American politics. The race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hinges on many things, and matters for many reasons—and neither her staunchest supporters nor her fiercest opponents tend to put gender at the top of those lists. But both the daughters of the delegates in Cleveland who chanted, “Lock her up!” and the sons of the delegates in Philadelphia who shouted, “I’m with her!” will grow up knowing that a woman can win a nomination, and perhaps the presidency. In fact, they’re unlikely to ponder the possibility that it could be otherwise.

That’s how it works when barriers fall; it’s hard to remember they were ever there at all.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” reads the Declaration signed in Philadelphia, “that all men are created equal.” In her speech, Clinton quoted lyrics from the musical Hamilton. But there was another couplet, from a different song, that she didn’t even need to repeat aloud: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” the heroine, Angelica Schuyler, sings. “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’mma compel him to include woman in the sequel.”