“I would too, I would too,” Dad said. “That is exactly what’s it’s going to take to make it happen.”

“I hope so,” Grandma concluded.

What breaks my heart about this exchange is that my grandmother, deep down, never really believed Ms. Warren or any woman would get the nomination. Maybe that’s because she had watched cable news repeat a self-fulfilling prophecy about electability. Maybe it’s because, as a woman who has seen so much, she knew that electability was a valid concern. Or maybe it’s because it hurts so dang much to let yourself harbor a dream that you might not see come true. Whatever her motivation, you know what? Grandma was right.

Nonetheless, their conversation was a mark of progress — my previously apathetic family now votes with gusto and would consider campaigning for a candidate, and my father must not be the only man who wore a hard hat and rooted for Ms. Warren.

Two weeks ago, when she placed fourth in the Nevada caucuses — in spite of thoroughly winning a Las Vegas candidates debate and pulling in nearly $3 million in donations the next day — I was on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I had just given a keynote address at a Planned Parenthood fund-raiser. It was the first time I’d ever toed the line of journalistic ethics by speaking on behalf of a peripherally political organization because, well, these are desperate times for women’s rights.

The event organizers shared with me that their impressive new health facility, ensuring reproductive health care for regional women, had been kept secret from the broader, conservative community throughout a capital campaign and construction. The men who built the structure, for instance, were told it would be a dentist’s office. Such measures were crucial to avoid blowback, vandalism or worse from anti-choice contingents. I understood, hailing from the area where the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered by a religious zealot in 2009.

After the fund-raiser and after watching Ms. Warren’s dismal returns on a hotel television, I spent the next day on the beach with a Geraldine Brooks novel I’d randomly purchased at a bookstore on Sanibel Island. The book, it turned out, was about a bright girl in the Massachusetts Bay Colony who is indentured as a servant in Cambridge to pay for her brother’s academic studies. Along the way, she tends the miscarriage of a girl whose rapist goes unpunished.

I looked out at the sea and considered that, for all our advancing on gender matters, the novel’s story is alive today: A woman must step aside as a man ascends to the presidency, and a “pro-life” activist would sooner bomb an abortion facility than let a raped girl cross its threshold.