Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will have a similarly negligible effect on the lives of American women. It isn’t exactly a Muppet News Flash that women can run for high office in these United States: You can be Sarah Palin and be on a major-party ticket and be called a “c**t” by all the nice people who will be urging you to vote for Mrs. Clinton as a show of solidarity with women. You can be a woman and do a hell of a lot better job running PepsiCo than Mrs. Clinton did running the State Department. You can be a woman and be seriously considered for the Republican nomination in spite of a slightly short political curriculum vitae. You can be a woman and be a Marine.

If your daughter didn’t already know that she could grow up and make of her life whatever her dreams and abilities allow, and learned otherwise only upon seeing a dreadful politician take the next step in her dreadful career, that isn’t a failure of a patriarchal society. You’re just a bad father.

Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will mean relatively little to women as such for the same reason that Barack Obama’s presidency has had little effect on black Americans as such: because these are large, diverse groups of people with wildly different backgrounds, economic interests, political preferences, and dreams. Nigerian-American Mormon entrepreneurs in Maryland and writers from Caribbean backgrounds in Texas and half-Kenyan politicians in Illinois and 17-year-old women in North Philadelphia are not a coherent unitary group, and neither is the female half of the American polity. These are crude categories used crudely by crude people for crude ends. What ends? Getting you to give them what they want by tricking you into believing that you are doing something for yourself by investing power and status in people with whom you share trivial personal characteristics and who in fact view you in purely instrumental terms.