Like a lot of American women who have demanding jobs and little time to rest, when Hillary Clinton got sick, she didn’t stop working. But unlike the many male political leaders who have fallen ill over the years – George W Bush who vomited on the Japanese prime minister’s lap, General David Petraeus who fainted during a congressional hearing – discussion of Clinton’s health has become a referendum on her fitness to lead.

The decision not to immediately disclose her pneumonia is being attacked as a lack of transparency. But, just as the illness isn’t unprecedented on the campaign trail, neither is working through it without alerting the media: John Kerry’s bout with the illness wasn’t revealed until after his 2004 bid had ended.

And it’s not hard to imagine why Clinton wasn’t keen on sharing her diagnoses. Any time Clinton coughs or is in the vicinity of a pillow, conspiracy theorists on the right insist she’s dying of some horrific and well-hidden disease. (Let’s call it AgingWhileFemale-itis.) Her departure from a 9/11 memorial service in New York, followed by a video of her looking woozy and stumbling, only heightened the frenzied speculation.

The delusion that Clinton is seriously ill is so ingrained in some people’s imaginations that #HillarysBodyDouble started trending on Twitter soon after she emerged from her daughter’s apartment looking markedly better. Only in 2016, our year of political cartoonishness, would some people think it’s more likely that Clinton employs a doppleganger than the less exciting truth that a few hours of rest and fluids go a long way when you’re under the weather.

Using health concerns as a cudgel to criticize women’s participation in public life, however, is nothing new. Our supposed fragility was a common anti-suffrage argument, for example, and suffragists were often painted as mentally unwell – their very desire to be part of the political process proof of their “hysteria”.

The link between women’s mental and physical fitness to political engagement was so strong, in fact, that Susan B Anthony once said that bicycles had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”. They not only quite literally got women out of the house and into more comfortable clothes, but they chipped away at the notion that women were physically weak.

Decades later, the notion that women’s bodies are somehow less suited for political life remains. After all, it wasn’t merely boorishness that led Donald Trump to criticize Megyn Kelly by alluding to her period – there’s a longstanding myth about women’s hormones making them unfit to lead. (Comedian Hari Kondabolu has my favorite response to sexists who think a woman’s judgement is impaired once a month: “I’m a man with a penis and testicles, my judgement is impaired every five to seven minutes.”)

It wasn’t a coincidence, either, that when Politico reported on Clinton’s illness they described her dizzy spell as “swooning” – a term rarely used to describe men. Even Trump’s comments that Clinton doesn’t have a “presidential look” signal a particular sexist disdain.

The truth is that the campaign trail is brutal, and working all hours through an illness like Clinton’s shows strength, not weakness. That we would see it as anything but stamina reveals a tired double standard. Besides, what’s more important right now than an individual’s health is the health of our nation. Coughs aside, I think we all know whose hands that would be safer in.