If she wins, Hillary Clinton won’t be the first female American to become President of a country. Janet Rosenberg beat her by a generation—and against much tougher odds.

Like Clinton, Rosenberg was born in Chicago—on the South Side, where Michelle Obama was raised, where Barack Obama first got into community organizing, where the Obama girls were born, and where the Obama Presidential Library will be built. Rosenberg came from a middle-class Jewish family. She grew into a handsome young woman, with high cheekbones set in a long, elegant face. She was outspoken, for the nineteen-forties. She also rode horses and learned to shoot. “Nothing much frightens me,” she once explained.

Rosenberg was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dashing Indo-Guyanese man with wavy black hair and a movie-idol smile. He was studying dentistry at Northwestern. Their parents didn’t approve of their multiracial, interfaith relationship. (He was Hindu.) Nevertheless, in 1943 they married and moved to British Guiana, then still a colony nestled next to Venezuela, on South America’s Caribbean coast.

The Jagans opened a dental-surgery practice in Georgetown, the capital. But politics was their first love. They were both leftists, radicals for the time. They soon joined the independence and labor movements in his home country, one of the poorest places in South America. The population was largely split between descendants of African slaves and indentured laborers from India who had worked on sugar plantations; only nine per cent were indigenous Amerindian. In the forties, Janet helped to organize domestic workers and to establish the Women’s Political and Economic Organization.

“Women must join in the struggle to bring about political and socio-economic changes so that there will be equal opportunities for all, so that we can end unemployment, poverty and hunger, so that genuine democratic institutions can flourish, so that our women can be free and equal citizens,” she once explained.

In the fifties, the Jagans co-founded the leftist and multiracial People’s Progressive Party; she was its secretary-general for two decades. He was elected the colony’s chief minister, on a pro-independence platform, in 1953. When Hillary Clinton was still in elementary school, Janet Rosenberg Jagan was elected deputy speaker of parliament and became the country’s first female cabinet minister.

The Jagans’ careers were turbulent, however. In 1954, their activism against colonial rule landed them in prison for six months; after that, they were under house arrest for two years. “Jail wasn’t easy from the physical point of view,” Janet later recalled. “But, like my husband, I treasured the quiet of jail from the furor outside. I did a lot of reading after insisting that women, like men, should have a right to have books.”

In 1957, she ran again for the legislature—and won. “We led the struggle by educating the people on the ills of colonialism and the need for unity to end the exploitation of this country by the dominant clique that wanted only power and profits—profits and power,” she said, in 1962. “We attained power by the valid ballot and proved our worth by winning in three successive elections—without benefit of a daily press or foreign finances. We did not attempt to grab power by bloodshed.”

But Janet Jagan was not universally admired. In 1963, Time called her “the most controversial woman in South American politics since Evita Perón.... Not only is she a white woman in a volatile land of East Indians and Negroes; she is also a strident Marxist and believed by many to be the brains and backbone” behind her husband. “I have no religion save the religion of equality,” she countered. In 1966, the British colony gained independence, as Guyana.

Janet won parliamentary races in 1973, 1980, 1985, and 1992—and became the parliament’s longest-serving member, her career spanning forty-six years. In 1992, during Guyana’s first completely free and fair elections, which were monitored by a team led by Jimmy Carter, Cheddi Jagan became President; Janet was his First Lady as well as a politician in her own right. By then, her hair had turned white, and she had cut her long locks into a functional bob. Cheddi died in 1997, from a heart attack, despite an emergency flight to Walter Reed Hospital, in Washington, D.C. Janet ran to succeed him, and won—even though she was American-born, white, and Jewish, facts the opposing campaign exploited in vicious attacks. She took office the same year that Bill Clinton began his second term in the White House.

In 1997, UNESCO awarded Janet Jagan the Gandhi Gold Medal for Peace, Democracy, and Women’s Rights. As President, she expanded her focus to include globalization and the environment. “In our continuing efforts to develop our country and meet the needs of our people, especially those living in poverty, my country remains dedicated to the preservation of the environment and the sustainable development of our resources,” she said, at a meeting of regional foreign ministers, in 1999. She resigned due to poor health a few months later, at the age of seventy-seven. Her life was chronicled in a PBS documentary in 2003. The first American woman to be president of a country died in 2009, the year Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State.

If she wins, Hillary Clinton will not break new ground for women in politics globally, either. As Stephen Colbert joked on his show last Friday, the United States “will finally catch up with Sri Lanka.” Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world’s first female prime minister, in a country then known as Ceylon, in 1960. She served three times, stepping down in 2000—the year Hillary first ran for the Senate. Her daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, was Sri Lanka’s longest-serving President, for eleven years, beginning in the mid-nineties.

In the past century, fifty-four countries on the six inhabited continents —about a quarter of the world’s nations—have had female Presidents or Prime Ministers. Bangladesh, Finland, Lithuania, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Slovakia have had more than one. Theresa May just became the United Kingdom’s second female Prime Minister.

The United States has not excelled at putting women in national legislatures. It currently ranks ninety-sixth out of a hundred and ninety-three countries, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Less than twenty per cent of U.S. representatives in the Senate and House are women.

Rwanda, one of the poorest nations, comes in first; two-thirds of its parliament is female. At least ten predominantly Muslim countries (not all democracies) have higher percentages: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Mauritania, Sudan, Tunisia, and Turkmenistan. Even Pakistan, despite being one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women, ranks higher—at eighty-third.

If she wins, Hillary Clinton will be a throwback to a much earlier model of women in power. Throughout most of history, women inherited political position or prominence from their fathers or husbands. The earliest recorded female leaders were in Egypt: Sobekneferu, some thirty-eight hundred years ago, came to power after her brother’s death, and Hatshepsut, three centuries later, after her husband’s. Hereditary monarchies were the primary route to the top, from the Biblical Queen of Sheba to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. The pattern of inherited power went on well into the twentieth century.