I am not one of the feminists who believes American women have a duty to their gender to vote for Hillary Clinton. Indeed, I’m with the gals who think the New York senator is a decidedly flawed feminist icon. She is certainly smart, disciplined and hard-working. But too much of her political career – including the “experience” she has claimed as the centrepiece of her campaign – is built on being Bill Clinton’s wife for me to be comfortable claiming her as a female trail-blazer.

Yet I am glad that Clinton’s run for the White House has made it OK to talk about sexism. For a while, the post-feminist, Sex and the City ethos felt so glamorous and came as such a relief after the gender wars of the 1970s and 1980s, that sexism seemed to have become a dirty word. But now that Clinton is just two contests away from the most powerful job in the world, thinking about gender has become part of America’s core curriculum.