The first non-white candidate for president of the United States won the right to make history in part because his leading opponent was a woman, described by one political analyst as a "she-devil.
" The other major political party then selected its own groundbreaking candidate in the person of a woman just coming through in the media as a throwback to Annie Oakley.
Despite appearances and regardless of legislation to achieve gender equality, a persistent decision is being made that Americans want their women dumb, cute and barefoot in the kitchen.
Michelle Obama, the wife of the Democratic candidate, has an undergraduate degree from Wellesley and a law degree from Harvard University.
Yet the only ambition she mentions in public as the wife of a presidential candidate is to be a good mother.
Perhaps that ambition for good motherhood was her incentive for putting in the grueling eight years it took to get a law degree from an institution to die for.
After all, a good mother implies a good father and Michelle did demurely joke at the Democratic Convention that Barack was her big bonus for putting in time at a prestigious law firm.
But that confession of ambition based on instinctual concession to reality, or the alternative of true concession to womanhood and mothering, brings up images of Hillary Clinton, with a law degree from Yale, who became embroiled in a chocolate chip cookie recipe contest while campaigning for husband Bill in 1992.
Now, 16 years later, the Republican vice-presidential candidate is a woman who entered politics through the Wassila, Alaska Parent and Teacher Association while raising five children.
Education isn't everything but in the United States it's a pawn in the "pale male" dominated social status hierarchy with an entitlement for that class to pick and choose among preferences at the highest public levels.
Bill Clinton's law degree from Yale and his Fulbright scholarship added to his stature because of his poor beginnings.
Bill Gates is admired for never having graduated from Harvard University because he made a ton of money.
George W.
Bush was sold to the American electorate as a man of the people because he declined to profit from the learning to which his family's privilege earned him at Yale.
In that same vein of the "pale male" dominated American hierarchy, the minority member Barack Obama could not have become a presidential candidate without his Harvard University magna cum laude law degree.
And he can't become President of the United States without his wife burying her own degree in favor of the woman decreed to be the image of woman Americans want to see.
Two months of campaigning should exponentially quicken the gelling of the image of woman Americans really want to see.
The election in November will be the proof of the pudding.
In the wake of that election milestone for America and the world, Hillary Clinton may emerge as a formidable woman of use to the world.
Likewise, Michelle Obama could dust off her credentials and pursue ambitions that would burnish her image as a woman of power in the eyes of her daughters.
That scenario would entail the return of an Annie Oakley mom to Alaska, where she would strengthen the PTA for her five children and head up an outpost state striving to be significant by drilling for oil in pristine American territory unnecessary if America had better relations with the countries presently producing oil.
That scenario would also state to the world that America was sharp and on the job in leading the globalization movement through capable hands regardless of gender.