MONROVIA, Liberia — Bernice Freeman was chatting with some market women, trying to explain why it was so important that they leave their food stalls to vote for the first woman to be elected president of an African country, when she noticed some boys laughing nearby, waving something white.

It was October 2005, the first presidential election after 15 years of a hideous civil war in Liberia. On the ballot was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated global technocrat with so much government experience it practically oozed from her pores, and a group of men, most notably the professional soccer player George Weah.

Like many of the 1.5 million women in Liberia who had survived the civil war, Ms. Freeman had personally witnessed acts of violence so brutal she still had nightmares. Soldiers had gutted her 8½-months-pregnant cousin. Drugged-up rebels wearing Halloween masks had murdered her friends. Ms. Freeman herself had knelt in the dirt, praying, while henchmen loyal to the president had chambered rounds of their machine guns on orders to shoot her and the other women praying with her one afternoon.

Ms. Freeman had seen it all. But even so, she was unprepared for the sight of the young men laughing nearby as she campaigned for a female president. The boys had taken women’s panties, had smeared the crotches with tomato paste and were waving them at the women — their unsubtle way of saying that a woman could not be president.