ELIZABETH WARREN practically leaps off the armchair in her Washington, D.C., condo when it hits her. “I got here today courtesy of three bags of M&Ms and a very cooperative toddler,” she says. By here she means the candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. I’ve just sat down with the Massachusetts senator, on taupe-colored furniture that looks plucked from a corporate-apartment catalog, to talk about the 2020 election. I mention in passing that I need to make the 4 p.m. Acela back to New York to relieve my babysitter. This reminds Warren of a lengthy story, told with expressive hand waving and a recitation of “Wheels on the Bus,” from her years as a working mom. She was about to start Rutgers Law School and desperately needed day care for her daughter Amelia. The only acceptable option she could find in the Newark area required that children be “dependably potty trained.” Amelia wasn’t even two at the time, but Warren spent all weekend luring her to the kiddie toilet with a rainbow of M&Ms. On Monday, Warren says, “I looked at the form . . . at Amelia, at the form, back at Amelia . . . and ‘Yep! Dependably potty trained, all right!’ ”

It’s an indelibly female story from a candidate who—like most of the other women running for president—would rather not talk about her gender on the campaign trail. Warren doesn’t lace her speeches with promises to make history or shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling. The steamy spring afternoon we meet in D.C., she is wearing her usual uniform of black tank top and black slacks, more proletariat rab-ble-rouser than solid-white suffragette.

And yet her gender is a subject she and the other female candidates can’t escape. (The day before, I’d heard an MSNBC pundit declare that Warren was not a “connectable female”— which led to a panel debate titled “Can a woman beat Trump? Some Democrats wonder if it’s worth the risk.”) Perhaps that’s because they have so little else in common. The six women running for the Democratic nomination come from different backgrounds. They range in age from 70 (Warren) to 38 (Representative Tulsi Gabbard). They are lawyers and senators, professors and soldiers and even an author and spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey (Marianne Williamson). They disagree on campaign tactics and policies. I spoke to Senator Amy Klobuchar just after she came out against Warren’s plan to cancel most student debt and make tuition at public colleges free. (And don’t even get the other women started on Gabbard’s foreign-policy positions.) But they also form an unlikely sisterhood in the inspiring, baffling, often infuriating contest to defeat President Trump.

While each has so far trailed the leading male candidates—Warren and Senator Kamala Harris poll closest to the top of this group—collectively they have smashed our stubborn assumptions about powerful women and permanently changed our notion of what a presidential election looks like. For the first time, multiple women stand on the presidential-debate stages, their presence signaling to millions of Americans that the era of a dozen men—and maybe a lone woman—arguing the issues is over. (When Governor Jay Inslee touted his record on women’s rights in the first debate in Miami, Klobuchar chimed in with, “I just want to say, there’s three women up here that have fought pretty hard for a woman’s right to choose.”)

These candidates have also, inevitably, reminded us of the hurdles, bordering on bulwarks, that women at the highest level of American politics still face. To many of us, watching the 2020 race unfold has felt less like a celebration of rah-rah feminism and more like a daily, live-tweeted, televised pelting by the patriarchy. Indeed, we cannot assess any of these candidates without also assessing our own biases. Debates about who is “electable” (or not) have become a smokescreen for lingering discomfort with what we have still, after 243 years as a republic, never seen: the election of a woman president.