The meaning of Hillary Clinton's candidacy

When Hillary Clinton was a youngster in Park Ridge, little girls didn't dream of some day growing up to become president.

Little girls' dreams were confined for a large number of them to what their husbands might become. If they dreamt of the White House, it was, ironically enough, a dream of occupying it as a first lady, the traditional way Hillary Clinton actually did end up occupying it.

Imagine, if you will, the pallid America of 1947, the achromatic place and time where she was born.

It was a time when it was not uncommon for an adult woman to be known by her husband's name. Mrs. Bill Clinton, it could easily have been then, with barely a hint of Hillary at all.

The U.S. Senate had 96 members, none of them women. The U.S. House of Representatives had 435 members; seven were women. Of those seven, three ended up in office as sentimental surrogates appointed to fill their dead husbands' seats.

One of those three emerged, however, as something different: Margaret Chase Smith, Republican from Maine, later ran for president when Clinton was 16. When Smith announced her bid in 1964, she became the first woman in the history of the republic to seek a major party presidential nomination.

Can you imagine? The first. Almost 188 years after the nation was founded.

Even then, Smith's candidacy was not taken seriously. It had significance as a historical precedent, but not much more. Her 27 convention delegates did not stir Oval Office fascinations. In his famous "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" speech at the Republican convention that year, nominee Barry Goldwater warmly mentioned Richard Nixon, Thurston Morton, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln, but there was no polite acknowledgment of Margaret Chase Smith.

Today, as Hillary Clinton takes the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the country observes the 88th anniversary of women's suffrage. The ratification of the 19th amendment providing women with the right to vote was certified on Aug. 26, 1920.

Can you imagine? Women did not win the right to vote until 1920. Only 27 years before Clinton was born. And 144 years after the nation had been.

During her long and sometimes bitter campaign with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, critics questioned why Clinton continued to press on, why she persisted in running long after the cause seemed lost. And why now, so many of her followers, particularly middle-aged women, remain embittered by her poignant defeat.

Can you imagine the backdrop? An unimaginable ambition almost realized. So close. Yet so traumatically far.

The gender gap has closed a good deal since 1947. The evidence is all around us. But there remains a distance to narrow.

"Far away, there in the sunshine, are my highest aspirations," said novelist Louisa May Alcott, a 19th century abolitionist and feminist. "I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead."

As she ascends the dais tonight, this is the legacy Hillary Clinton brings:

Today, little girls can dream of growing up to become president.