No, it really doesn’t. Clinton is the first woman ever to win a single primary, let alone get close to actually winning the nomination. Yes, Carol Moseley Braun has run, and Shirley Chisholm has run, and Cynthia McKinney is running now. But seeing as how none of those campaigns were ever truly viable, Clinton is still blazing a whole new path.

Now, the fact that those campaigns weren’t/aren’t viable raises a whole lot of questions about the intersection of racism and sexism — important questions that are getting shoved aside in the whole black man v. white woman contest we have going on right now. But that’s a separate issue from whether Carol Moseley Braun’s runs were equivalent to Clinton’s. They just weren’t.

As for black men getting the vote before white women, I don’t even know where to start. It is impossible to honestly analyze why black men got the vote before white women without mentioning the granting of the vote as partial redress for the evils of slavery. Also, it’s not at all clear that continuing to deny black men the right to vote would have caused white women (or women of any other color) to get the vote any earlier than they did. The disenfranchisement of women was distressingly common in “democracies” in through the early 20th century. Finally, before women got the vote in 1920, the vast majority of black people lived in the South. For these black people, voting was more than just “hard,” it was impossible or punishable by death. And as we all know, a substantial percentage of black men and women were denied the right to vote or maimed or murdered for daring to do for decades after white women were safely exercising that right.

Legal, yes. Acknowledged, not necessarily. Given how hard some white people have worked to keep African Americans out of the voting booth in every election since then, but especially those before 1964, that is not a winning argument.

Sexism and racism are both very much alive and well, and I’m not interested in playing Oppression Olympics here.

I am not American and I haven’t lived in the US for several years, so I will not judge if the US is really less racist than sexist – if it is even possible to compare the strength of racism and sexism in a meaningful way. However, I think it is certainly not enough to only compare the chances of female vs. black presidency candidates or when Blacks and women got the right to vote. My home country, Germany, does have a female head of government at the moment, yet, in a lot of subtler ways sexism is alive and well there, and in some sectors possibly stronger than in the US (for example, German universities have a far lower percentage of female professors).
While it is possible that a black man might have better chances to become the next American president than a white woman – how does the situation of the average black man compare to that of the average white woman in the US? This is not only about things that are relatively easy to measure, such as income or education level, but also about how much a black man or a white woman has to conform to white, male culture in order to be taken seriously. Additionally, the female stereotype has traditionally been quite ambiguous – for example, women are seen as less competent, but also on average more likeable than men. I don’t think this is true to the same degree for the black stereotype.

I voted and caucused for the Ds in Texas last night, and saw something that – while I grinned the whole time I marked my ballot for Obama – completely plucked my heartstrings. A spry old lady – 80 if she was a day – finished signing in for caucus and walked away from the table (slowly, on a cane). But she stopped and turned back to a clerk, beaming, to say: “I will see a woman president in my lifetime.”

Whether or not it’s Clinton, I hope she has enough years ahead of her to be right.

That said, there’s a part of me trying to consider this race from an historical angle. I don’t like any of the three, so I’m left with a male WASP, a black man, and a white woman. Which one will set the best precedent from the perspective of 20, 30, 50 years from now. Well, I think we’ve had enough of the male WASPs; another won’t make a difference. 30 years ago, I’d have said (were I around) that a white anything is almost certainly more electable than a black man. Oops, boy was I wrong.

Seems we, as a country, are less racist and sexist. You think that doesn’t make sense, because we (those of us born after it all) tend to judge the beginning of the end of racism from the 1950’s and all the civil rights actions of that time. When you look at it though, no matter how hard it was for them, the had the legal, acknowledged right to vote more than a half century before women got it. They stopped being property decades before women did. And a black man has more of a chance at the presidency because he is a man, than a woman does, because she “thinks with her hormones.”

OC: You say that Clinton is hard to trust because she is using a lying, cheating, sexual harasser to campaign for her? Why is she using him? Well, what would happen if she didn’t? What would happen if she had stood up to the country and said, “If all he had done was cheat on me, I’d still be there, but he lied about it to deny another woman her chance at justice, and my ideals will not stand for it.” She would have been remembered, forever, as the woman who just couldn’t get over her husband cheating on her. Her morals would have assumed to have been an excuse only so that she could attempt to justify politically ditching her husband for cheating on her. She never, ever would have had a chance. And the same goes for him not campaigning for her now. If he isn’t up there doing that it will be assumed that he thinks she isn’t really the best candidate. There would obviously be “something wrong” with her if her husband didn’t support her publicly. Your points are still entirely valid, and, from a feminist perspective, I still find it hard to trust her, but, at this time in history, she doesn’t have another choice if she wants to be president.