Elizabeth Warren wasnt trying to be the first female president.

She wanted to be president. She wanted to cut banks down to size and relieve student debt. Root out the corrupt influence of money in politics and go after monopolies.

Warren didnt focus on how shed be breaking a glass ceiling. She didnt shy away from her gender, but when she talked about feminism, it was most often centered on female organizers and the movements theyve led throughout history.

But Warren couldnt just run for president. At every step of the campaign, she was reminded that people still saw her as a female candidate, with all the baggage that comes with that designation questions about her toughness, likability and relatability.

No male candidate has ever been asked what it meant to run as a man for president. They have all had the luxury of being self-defined by other qualities. Warren never had that moment.

Gender in this race, you know that is the trap question for every woman, Warren said in her press conference Thursday, announcing she was dropping out. If you say, Yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, Whiner! And if you say there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, What planet do you live on? I promise you this I will have a lot more to say on that subject later on.

From the start, the senator from Massachusetts had to wrestle with twin dilemmas: what it meant to champion her views and what it meant to do so as a female candidate.

Doubts about Warren began as soon as she announced she was forming an exploratory bid. There were instantly comparisons to Hillary Clinton who is actually nothing like Warren and had a completely different set of policies and challenges. But theyre also white women of a certain age, so Warren had to deal with the assumption that she would be the same as Clinton.

The biggest and most damaging assumption? Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, so Warren probably would, too.

But Can She Win?

Warren was constantly dogged by questions of electability . Voters said they liked her, but they werent sure she could win.

Unfortunately, I dont really believe that a woman can win the general presidential election. Hillary sort of proved that for me, one woman told HuffPost.

Another woman told The New York Times, I think right now theres still not going to be a female president , unfortunately. Right now I think we kind of not regressed, but looked to the past.

In March 2019, a HuffPost/YouGov poll found that Warren came in fifth when Democratic voters were asked who could beat Trump. The top three were white men, followed by Harris and then Warren.

Three in 10 Democratic voters thought that most of the electorate would be less likely to vote for a female candidate because of her gender, compared with just 4% who thought a male candidate would face a similar disadvantage.

Other polls had similar results. A 2019 Ipsos/Daily Beast poll , for example, found that 74% of respondents claimed they were comfortable with a female president, but only 33% believed their neighbors would be.

Warren eventually made a push to emphasize her electability , but it came far too late in the campaign.

This hesitation about whether a woman can be elected president broke out into a messy public fight in January.

CNN reported that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Warren in a 2018 private meeting that he didnt believe a woman could defeat Trump in 2020.

Warren finally had to address the gender issue head-on. She didnt give a speech about the struggles shed faced as a female candidate; she simply confirmed the CNN report and asked to move on: Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.

In 2018, Warren told journalist Rebecca Traister that she has had to deal with these well-intentioned doubts since she considered running for the Senate in 2011.

That was the saddest part, the most infuriating part about these calls; they came from people who wanted to be kind but wanted to make sure that I understood the hard reality of America , she said.

Sanders supporters responded to Warren confirming the CNN report by saying she was lying or accusing her of being a traitor to the progressive cause. People who appeared to be Sanders supporters started flooding her social media posts with snake emojis and using the hashtags #NeverWarren or #WarrenIsASnake.

But if Sanders did make those remarks, they shouldnt have been that surprising. Former Vice President Joe Biden made similar, but more direct, comments to what Sanders allegedly said, but they received far less attention.

And a few days after the CNN report, which Sanders denied, he gave a radio interview in which he said all the candidates have their own sets of problems . His was the fact that hes 78. Warrens was that shes a woman.

So everybody brings some negatives, if youd like, Sanders said.

But the dispute infuriated just as many Warren supporters as Sanders backers.

Tanya Keith, a 48-year-old undecided voter in Des Moines, Iowa, who attended a Warren event in mid-January, told the senator she believed her fully .

I know that Bernie Sanders said those things to you, because I have seen your body language, and Ive seen his body language, said Keith. And I know what men say to us in rooms and then what they say to us in person to gaslight us, and I just want you to know that I believe you 100%.

Warren understood the significance of her candidacy. And in her press conference announcing the end of her presidential bid Thursday, she talked about the pinky promises she had made with little girls she met during the campaign, reminding them that they can grow up to be president.

One of the headest parts of this is all those pinky promises, Warren said. And all those little girls who have to wait four more years.

Always The Professor