Quoted: More important, feminists need not be too heartbroken at their heroine’s loss. The truth – and it is one worth remembering this week as paeans to Mrs Clinton’s stalwart campaigning come pouring in – is that the New York senator was always an imperfect standard-bearer for the cause of female advancement in the US. Even her harshest critics admit she is smart, tough, disciplined and incredibly hard-working – but none of those sterling qualities negates the biographical fact that the US’s first credible female contender for the White House owes her national political career to marrying the right guy.

In using her marriage – notably her eight years as first lady, which was often invoked as evidence that she would be “ready on day one” – as her launch pad, Mrs Clinton has more in common with the wives and daughters who inherited high office in dynasty-friendly regimes in south-east Asia and Latin America. It contrasts with leaders such as Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher, who were elected to run Group of Seven high-income countries under their own steam.

It is a critical difference. For one thing, where marriage or paternity have put women in power it is hard to be sure they have broken glass ceilings for the rest of us. The persistent, punishing societal sexism of some countries that have been ruled by women who got to the top through family connections suggests their breakthroughs reflect the importance of political clans more than that of girl power.

Moreover, the dynastic path to the White House is a route Americans of both genders should treat with suspicion, and not only because of the sorry performance of the latest child of a president to take over his father’s job. Rejection of the aristocratic principle was one of the great revolutionary ideals upon which the republic was founded: that does not quite chime with the fact that, were Mrs Clinton to be elected president in November, just two families would have shared that post for at least 24 continuous years, and maybe for 28. Oddly, for all the hardball character of this nominating battle, this aspect of Mrs Clinton’s bid has received little domestic scrutiny. But Americans should be aware that in countries such as Russia and China, where democracy is still a dissident’s dream, dynastic succession in the US would help bolster the ruling regimes’ arguments that American democracy is merely a Potemkin village.