The idea that we should like our politicians predates women’s suffrage, let alone women in politics. Pushed by Madison Avenue and preached by self-help gurus, likability is a s tandard that history shows us was created and sold by men. The bad news is that means it’s a tricky fit for women. The good news is that what was invented once can be reinvented.

Likability seems to have emerged as an important personality trait in the late 19th century, when it became closely associated with male business success. Before this, people liked or disliked one another, of course, but it wasn’t until after the Civil War, when middle-class men began to see virtue and character as essential to personal advancement, that success in business required projecting likability.

Businessmen joined service associations like the Knights of Columbus (founded in 1882) and Rotary International (1905), and male friendship — men being liked, and liking other men — became a key element for attaining civic leadership. Popular authors like Horatio Alger promoted “likability” as a way of making one’s virtue visible, and thus paving the road to prosperity. The shoeshine boy Ragged Dick, the hero of one Alger novel, does good deeds that cause strangers to warm to him and give him a leg up. Describing Dick as “frank and straightforward, manly and self-reliant,” Alger hoped his readers would “like him as I do.”

By the 20th century, the advertising and public relations experts of Madison Avenue specialized in making products likable too, by associating them with figures — the actor Robert Montgomery or the aviator Amelia Earhart, for instance — they believed consumers already had an attachment to. The point was to generate a sense of connection that felt “real,” even if the consumer might suspect that the feeling of liking the product had been created by a well-orchestrated jingle, billboard or print ad.

Americans were also taught that being likable was a quality that could be cultivated as a means to get ahead. In 1936, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” warned that those who tried too hard to be liked would fail: Theodore Roosevelt’s naturally friendly greetings to everyone he passed, regardless of status, Carnegie noted, had made it impossible not to like him, but Henrietta G., now the “best liked” counselor at her office, had been isolated until she learned to stop bragging. (Though looking back, we have to wonder: Would Henry G. have needed to hide his accomplishments?)