The question that had come so close to fading into irrelevance is back: Will I ever see a woman elected president?

As Senator Elizabeth Warren became the fifth woman to exit the 2020 presidential race, announcing her departure on March 5 after failing to win a single one of the first primaries, women are coming to terms with the fact that, for the 244th straight year, the person America chooses to lead it in November will be a man.

“I don’t want to say I expected this, but I’m a black woman, so let’s put it this way: I don’t actually presume to be treated fairly,” says Leah Williams, a marketing director in Gulfport, Florida, and a volunteer on the Warren campaign. “It’s expected but disappointing.” (When Glamour reached Williams on Wednesday night, she was at a Warren campaign office, continuing to train volunteer phone bankers.)

“I never thought I was going to have to have a conversation with my daughter about how we have to do all the big and important work in this country, but we don’t get the official credit for it,” says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor and education policy researcher in Philadelphia. “I actually thought we had a chance.” Goldrick-Rab’s daughter is 10, and her son is 13. “He gets to see white man after white man, who looks like him, go into these jobs. And what she just saw was a bunch of really intelligent women work incredibly hard and lose.”

For Democrats, the future is fraught as the race builds towards a showdown between former vice president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, which will then give way to a messy battle between the eventual nominee and President Donald Trump. With that on the horizon, the election demands that all eyes turn forward toward the fight. But for some women, there’s a sense that attention must be paid to this reality: Baby girls born in the next four years will come into a country that is, in this single but significant way, identical to the one that existed in 1776.

“I think it just goes to show where American society is right now—that you have to be ten times as good, plus likable, plus have the perfect amount of kindness, plus be electable, whatever that’s supposed to mean,” says Lorena Roque, a recent college graduate working as a policy analyst in Washington, D.C. “As a Latina woman, it’s really disappointing. #MeToo and the Women’s March made us so hopeful and optimistic and persistent. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t come to fruition.”