The scenes blend like images from a kaleidoscope. A woman, blond, jubilant in a white dress, shown magnified on a convention center screen in San Francisco. It is Geraldine A. Ferraro in 1984 accepting the Democratic nomination that made her the first woman in the nation to be tapped by a major party to run for vice president.

Turn the lens. A woman, blond, in a white tunic, smiling, arms thrown wide at a rally in Brooklyn this past week. It is Hillary Clinton claiming the Democratic nomination, the first woman to become the presidential standard-bearer for a major party.

There are those who now say that a woman running for president was inevitable, that the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that Mrs. Clinton talks about are just time moving on. There are the sighs that Mrs. Clinton is the wrong woman, the unexciting woman, the compromising woman. And there are those who say they could never vote for a Democrat, particularly this one.

But it took 32 years to get from one scene to the other, so a look back to the Ferraro campaign can tell a lot about how the country has changed, and how it has not, through these decades of cultural ferment over the roles of the sexes.