Many fiercely loyal Hillary-ists appreciate her lifelong commitment to empowering women and girls. As secretary of state, she worked that issue into the portfolio of future secretaries. A gynecologist who is exactly Mrs. Clinton’s age represents legions of women adamant about saving reproductive freedom: “I’m not voting for any politician who has inordinate interest in what goes on in my vagina.”

WHEN I began writing about the Clintons in the earliest days of their first national campaign in 1992 as a “two for the price of one” president, I asked the cocky young governor of Arkansas about their long-term goal. Bill Clinton sang out the private slogan of their eternal campaign:

“Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill.”

I used to hear from professional boomer women endless predictions of when Hillary Clinton would leave her cheating husband — after they exited the White House, once she won her Senate election, certainly once she bought her own home in Washington. I always said she would never leave him; they are symbiotic, and besides, they love each other.

For many women who have lived through similar betrayals in life, another narrative has taken hold in recent years: Hillary Clinton is the model of an indomitable woman. She deflects shaming and swallows humiliation and keeps her eye on her purpose in life. She is a deeply committed mother and partner to one of the most gifted political leaders of our time. It took a Hillary to raise a president, to keep their family together, and to allow them to continue contributing to this country and the world.

In early 1992, I watched her develop a political strategy that for years deflected her own anger at Bill Clinton’s women. I was standing next to Mrs. Clinton in a motel lobby when the TV flashed an image of Gennifer Flowers, a lounge singer with slot-machine eyes. She was playing phone tapes of steamy sex talk with Governor Clinton for the press. I stared at Hillary Clinton’s profile. No surprise. Quick blink. She dispatched a press secretary to “get our surrogates on the line.” Sitting knee to knee with her on the tiny plane out of South Dakota, I heard her swear that if she had Ms. Flowers on the stand, “I would crucify her.” That’s when she laid down the strategy the Clintons used until recently: “Pound the Republican attack machine and run against the press.”

Now, the Clintons’ union is again campaign fodder. Mr. Trump is branding Mrs. Clinton as the “enabler” who defended Bill Clinton from a decade of attacks as what Mr. Trump calls “one of the great abusers of the world.”

This strategy, on Mr. Trump’s part, digs up memories of the tawdry tabloid years and the so-called “bimbo eruptions” that Mrs. Clinton’s contemporaries, especially women, would rather not recall. Millennial women will most likely be learning for the first time not just how Bill Clinton’s presidency brought the country a budget surplus, but why he was impeached and what his wife did to save him.

Her strategy for coping then was an instructive one.

In 1999, when I published a biography of this globally admired woman, “Hillary’s Choice,” I viewed the Clinton presidency through the lens of the Clinton marriage. The saga of Bill and Hillary, with its echoes of Eleanor and Franklin and undertones of Bonnie and Clyde, was animated by melodrama, narrow escapes, knock-down-drag-outs. They seemed to thrive on it.