Embedded between the melodramatic and the wackadoo were searing stories about race, sexuality, rape and stigma. Pat Matthews had an illegal abortion on “Another World” in 1964, and in 1973, Lucci’s Erica became the first television character to terminate a pregnancy after Roe v. Wade. It is not an accident that soaps were the setting for one of Hollywood’s smartest films about gender, 1982’s “Tootsie.” Daytime dramas were transgressive, unhinged from traditional expectations, loopy in their freedoms and powerfully popular.

Until things changed.

At some point — perhaps around the time that prime time began borrowing liberally from soaps’ multiplotted formulas and the Internet and cable made television audiences harder to hold at every hour — executives seemed to lose confidence in what was unique about their form. Daytime TV became more like what was shown at night. The shows’ focuses shifted away from multigenerational matriarchies and homed in on younger casts. Macho guys and their averagely violent story lines pulled shows along. “The women were shoved to the side,” Nochimson observed.

Whether because of competition, or the genre’s changing nature, audiences have dwindled. “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” each average around 2.5 million viewers; compare that with soap opera’s pinnacle event, the 1981 marriage of Luke and Laura on “General Hospital,” which drew more than 30 million viewers. And as in other televised realms, reality comes cheap. “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” will be replaced not by scripted drama but by one show about food and another about “personal transformation.”

In some ways, though, it’s impossible for soap operas to completely vanish. Strands of their DNA can be found all over network and cable TV, in everything from “The Sopranos” to “The Good Wife.” And daytime is no longer the only venue in which women can be creators; Shonda Rhimes of “Grey’s Anatomy” and Lena Dunham, the 25-year-old behind HBO’s “Girls,” now have jobs that Phillips and Nixon might not have imagined. Shows like “Weeds” and “Damages” also mean that daytime hours are not the only ones in which women continue to perform meaty parts into middle age.

But nothing like that afternoon block devoted to drama by and about complicated women exists any longer. That’s a real loss.

After the 2009 cancellation of “Guiding Light,” one of its stars, Crystal Chappell, who played half of a popular lesbian couple that had not been allowed to consummate their relationship on stodgy CBS, created her own Internet series, “Venice,” promising in part a more direct portrayal of gay life. “Venice,” now in production on its third season, is shot on a shoestring and is shown in 12-episode batches. It’s marginal and modern; characters of varying ages swear, and women are shown in bed together. It’s soap opera, rejiggered for a new age.

“I don’t think soaps are dying,” said Chappell, who, in the tradition of her energetic forebears, is at work on a second show. “I think they are cutting costs and transitioning for a while on the Web. Even if they make it back to television eventually, the Internet is a nice place for the interim.”

Or perhaps, as in Chappell’s case, a move online will allow women to recapture the pioneering spirit of early soaps: to remake rules, and worlds, of their own.