In early 1979, on a community access television program called In Focus, the wife of the new governor of Arkansas was peppered with question after question about all the ways in which she was an untraditional woman.

"The thought occurs to me that you really don't fit the image that we have created for the governor's wife in Arkansas," the host, a self-described "newsman," said to 32-year-old Hillary Rodham. "You're not a native, you've been educated in liberal eastern universities, you're less than 40. You don't have any children. You don't use your husband's name. You practice law. Does it concern you that maybe other people feel that you don't fit the image that we have created for the governor's wife in Arkansas?"

She looked through her large, thick-lensed glasses and smiled.

"No," she began, "because just as I said before …"

She had made a choice. In 1974, she had moved to Arkansas to be with her boyfriend, Bill Clinton. It was a decision that would dictate so many others, big and small, for decades to come—and here, in this spartan studio, on this rinky-dink show, was one of them. How to respond to this man?

This issue of wifeliness was being put to the first female lawyer at the finest firm in Little Rock. Rodham had been one of just 27 women among the 200-plus students in her law school class at Yale. She was one of only three on the staff of 44 attorneys on the Watergate impeachment team. She could have responded to the interviewer by pointing out any of these things. It was the '70s: She could have responded with an impassioned lecture about feminism, or chauvinism, or women's lib. But she didn't. She responded with an equanimity that must have been a challenge to muster. "That doesn't bother me, and I hope that doesn't bother very many people," she said.

Rodham by then was already hugely accomplished. But it also was true that she had arrived in the governor's mansion not as a governor but as the governor's wife. And when she arrived at the White House, 13 years later, it would be in the same way—as the unelected half of a couple, attracting more questions about her role, not only from traditionalists, who queried her all over again, but also from feminists—even some fellow Wellesley grads—who believed she should have gotten there under her own power. "We should not take a second seat to our life partners," one alum would write, "and Hillary should not be applauded for having reached her position by doing so."

So here, now, is Hillary Clinton—168 years after the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in New York, 96 years after women in America gained the right to vote, 37 years after that community-access interview—poised to be elected president. The 45th President of the United States. And the first woman. If the polls are right, she is on the verge of an outcome that would be no less historic than the election of Barack Obama. If she wins on Tuesday, she will be, forever, the woman who shattered the highest, hardest glass ceiling.

If she wins on Tuesday, she will be, forever, the woman who shattered the highest, hardest glass ceiling.

A deep look at her record of her pursuit of power and interviews with people who have known her throughout her adult life suggest that the Hillary Clinton who sits at that cusp—the guarded 69-year-old woman Americans have watched so closely on this year's campaign trail—is a personality forged through a career-long collision with the constantly shifting set of gender-based expectations people have put on her.