My mother always hated Hillary Clinton. Partly, that was politics—they don't agree on much—but the animosity also felt personal. For years, I chalked it up to generational angst: They both came of age in the 1960s, when women faced limited career choices and diminished expectations. Hillary was proof of what a smart, competent woman could accomplish, given the right opportunities.

The trouble, from my mother's standpoint: Those opportunities started with a husband.

And one lesson from the 2016 campaign was that it wasn't only boomers who felt this way. The summer before the election, I interviewed millennial women about Clinton, picking at the social dynamics that, to them, made her historic candidacy feel ho-hum. Whether they were ambivalent or adored her, many brought up the same regret. They’d been raised to believe that girls could do anything, independent of boys. So to them, it would have been a diminishment—an unfortunate asterisk—if the first woman president had started as First Lady.

Never mind that Hillary Rodham was a prominent college valedictorian before she met Bill Clinton—and, as plenty of endorsements noted, more qualified for the presidency, based on résumé alone, than perhaps any candidate ever. She never fully claimed an independent identity. Some of that was self-inflicted; the Clinton Foundation, a morally challenged maelstrom of influence and power, was a constant issue in the campaign, a reminder of Bill and Hillary's intertwined paths.

But Hillary also ran up against a particular interpretation of our American myth of meritocracy. As a politician, you get special points for seeming cleanly self-made. Even if you’re rich, you rifle through the leaves of the family tree to pluck out a coal miner or a mail carrier or bartender, whose wholesome American spirit was the start of it all. For all of her accomplishments, Hillary seemed an exception to the ideal.

In actuality, American politics is thick with patrilineage. Sons take advantage of the family name and the family connections. Daughters do too: See Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney. Some second- and third-generation politicians turn out to be competent leaders, even great ones. Some face complaints and complications; think of the constant pop psychoanalysis of George W. Bush.