On Saturday, Hillary Rodham Clinton told thousands of people at a rally on Roosevelt Island in New York City that she wanted the United States to be a place “where a father can tell his daughter yes, you can be anything you want to be, even president of the United States.” It was a line she used in her concession speech in 2008 and one that highlights what could happen if she or, less likely, Carly Fiorina win her party’s nomination and ultimately the presidency. Nearly 100 years after women were given the right to vote, Americans may send their first woman to the Oval Office.

The role that female candidates will play in 2016 — and probably in most future presidential campaigns — helps highlight how attitudes have changed over the last 80 years. The changes over the decades can be described in one word: gradual. But the state of opinion today, about the possibility of a female president, demands a different word: accepting.

It wasn’t always so.

Only two years after the “you’ve come a long way, baby” Virginia Slims ad campaign was this stark reminder from a poll the company commissioned in 1970: Two-thirds of Americans agreed that there wouldn’t be a female president for a “long time” and that it was “just as well.” The marketers at Virginia Slims turned this skepticism about a female president into a print ad showing a campaign button for “Rosemary for President” above the tagline “Someday.”