She has chosen to peek her head back into public life just as those of us who wanted to see a woman win the presidency are experiencing a brand-new electoral disappointment: On Thursday, another obviously competent, deeply intelligent, pathbreaking woman surrendered her chance to compete for the presidency. That this is the same woman a great many progressive Hillary-haters claimed they wanted to run — “I’m not sexist, I would vote for Elizabeth Warren” was an assertion so common in 2016 it became a cliché — makes Ms. Warren’s loss all the more bitter.

It’s a traumatic case of déjà vu: Yet again, our fellow citizens were willing to reject a strong (and in 2016, conspicuously superior) female candidate because she didn’t fit an impossible vision of female political perfection, instead voting in favor of a septuagenarian white man. Ms. Warren is now enjoying an outpouring of appreciation and acclaim that she didn’t receive while she was campaigning. Those who didn’t bother supporting her in the primary may not want her to stay in the race, but they still want her to champion their cause.

Or, more specifically, to pick their man and be his champion.

Watching “Hillary,” and then watching Ms. Warren step back, was simultaneously depressing and clarifying. What emerged for me was a distillation of months’ worth of increasing anxiety: that we are, as the writer Susan Faludi put it in her 1991 book on feminism in the United States, on the cusp of a backlash.

Which also answers the question, Why do we have to think about Hillary now?

One of the central arguments of “Hillary” is that Mrs. Clinton’s public life tracks pretty well with the ups and downs of American feminism. Her arrival at college and law school coincided with a wave of baby boomer women newly inspired by the promise that women were on the rise and could do anything — only to find that wasn’t quite true.

Her decision to keep her own last name when she was the first lady of Arkansas was partly blamed for her husband’s loss in his bid for a second term as governor, which is how Hillary Rodham becomes Mrs. Clinton. Her arrival at the White House as the feminist wife of a Southern Democrat occurred right after a record number of women — four — were elected to the U.S. Senate.

As the writer Rebecca Traister has pointed out, Mrs. Clinton is remarkably popular when she’s not competing with men for power; as soon as she runs for something, her approval ratings sink. The same could arguably be said for feminism itself: that when we’re looking back at what our foremothers accomplished, we’re laudatory and grateful; when demands are made for uncomfortable change right now, especially if it might mean that men have to step back, we want women to shut up.

For better or worse, Mrs. Clinton has spent decades as the walking embodiment of American gender anxieties at the same time as she has also been occasionally the apotheosis of feminist ambition. And when the one woman who rises to the top is that woman, and then she doesn’t fulfill all of our impossible and conflicting expectations, we draw the same bad conclusions the public too often derives from firsts: We project failures, real or perceived, onto everyone who resembles that trailblazer.