Whenever Elizabeth Warren came across a young girl while campaigning, the Massachusetts senator would crouch down and tell the girl why she was running:

“I’m running for president because that’s what girls do.”

She would then wrap her little finger around the girl’s little finger in a pinky promise to remember that.

“It’s a reminder that for a long time women have been shut out of the process, devalued, told to be quiet,” Warren told People magazine. “We’re just not doing that anymore.”

I was excited to see six women running at the start of the Democratic presidential race. Warren’s announcement on Thursday that she was withdrawing left one, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

“One of the hardest parts of this is all the pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait for four more years," Warren told reporters in the driveway of her Cambridge home.

Many grown women were counting on that promise, too.

Warren was one of us, a presidential candidate who understood issues like maternal health, paid parental leave, child care and education, because she had experienced it.

She was qualified, brilliant and, on every issue, from taxes to student loans, her response was, “I have a plan for that.”

It wasn’t enough. Warren constantly faced concerns about her “electability,” which critics claimed was really about gender.

"If you say, ‘yeah there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says ‘whiner,’ and if you say no there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, ‘what planet do you live on?’ " she said.

Will America ever elect a woman president? In a January USA TODAY poll, 56% of Americans said the nation was ready.

That's 7% lower than in August.

It will happen. Some day.

“It’s just going to be a little longer before we have a woman in the White House,” Warren said.

It will happen. Pinky promise.

Reach Karina Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @KarinaBland.

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