It was with that same grit that Mrs. Clinton picked herself up after a bruising defeat by Mr. Obama in 2008, when she assured a crowd of tearful female supporters, eight years ago to the day, that they had made 18 million cracks in “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

For 14 straight years, and 20 in all, Mrs. Clinton has been named the woman Americans admire most, according to a yearly Gallup poll. But her campaign, and the controversy over her use of a private email server as secretary of state, have taken a toll: Her favorability and trustworthiness ratings have plummeted. And she is being caricatured, once more, as a calculating and inauthentic career politician: Lady Macbeth, now in her own play.

In the same way, her longevity and fame are not undiluted assets: The baggage she brings as a consummate Democratic insider, pointed up most damagingly in the enormous sums she commanded as a paid speaker to Wall Street banks, has weighed Mrs. Clinton down in an election cycle in which outsiders have had the wind at their backs.

Mrs. Clinton’s career has not taken a predictable route by any stretch. She came of age in the feminist movement in the 1960s at Wellesley College — where she urged her peers to spurn incremental change and instead work at “making the impossible possible” — then was drawn to the South in furtherance of her husband’s ambitions. She was one of her husband’s chief campaign strategists and overseer of a failed health care effort, while holding her marriage together through his sex scandals and impeachment.

But if she seemed to embody contradictions, they also reflected a society in which expectations of women, and women’s expectations for themselves, were rapidly changing.

And it has always been hard to parse opinions about Mrs. Clinton and about powerful women in general.