While nobody on the planet has a story that’s quite like Hillary Clinton’s, she’s also very typical of many women who came of age in the 1960s—Daddy’s little girl, a college activist who managed to demand revolutionary change without ever getting in trouble with the administration. She lived with her boyfriend in law school. He was proud of how smart she was, but once they got married, she downscaled her own career goals to make way for his. (How many well-connected Washington lawyers with a passion for children’s rights issues decide that the best opportunities for advancement lie in Little Rock?) When she ran for the U.S. Senate from New York, she spoke to the American belief in second chances, in everyone’s right to try to remake themselves and take another grab at the brass ring. For women her own age, who had put their most audacious ambitions on hold while they raised a family, she was a promise that there was still time to do something amazing, even if you were starting over at 40, or 50, or—what the heck, it’s the 21st century—60. When she ran for president, so many people expected her to deliver that holy grail of a woman in the White House. She lost, but in the process, she did something that might be just as important. She got the country used to the idea of a female president. It seems normal to us now, and that’s Hillary’s gift.