The Rules for a Fair Fight

"Hair, husbands and hemlines," says Duerst-Lahti.

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Which leads us to . . .

Managing the husband

This is a particular issue for Clinton, of course. But prominent spouses can be an issue for any political candidate because they tend to draw the spotlight away from the person running for office. (See: Teresa Heinz.) It just so happens that, as Joan Hoff, former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, points out, female candidates are more likely to have spouses who are at least as successful and prominent as they are.

And then there's the larger cultural discomfort of a man subordinated. Pratt says when she served as mayor, people tended to assume her husband had a larger role in the decision-making of her office than he did.

Cut to the academic: "It's because we think of men as autonomous and we think of women as heteronomous. Women are always connected; men stand alone," Duerst-Lahti says.

In a best-case scenario, the spouse himself recognizes the need to maintain a supporting role. Bill Orr, who once described himself as "a former male chauvinist pig," has said he had to come around to the idea of his wife, Kay, running for governor of Nebraska. But she ran and won -- serving from 1987 to 1991 -- and he decided he needed to raise money to redecorate the mansion.

He put out a "First Gentleman's Cookbook."

Be prepared to be a symbol.

In the same way that a smaller statistical sample means that each person polled carries more weight, women on the national stage are made to stand in for other women. They are studied for what they tell us about the state of contemporary womanhood.

During her husband's first term, Clinton told the Wall Street Journal: "A friend told me I've turned into a gender Rorschach test. People are not really often reacting to me so much as they are reacting to their own lives and the transitions they are going through."

Everything is symbolic. Everything is closely studied for its intent and its implications. Which is why women can get offended if a male candidate calls his female opponent "ma'am" a lot, as Bob Ehrlich did to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in a 2002 gubernatorial debate in Maryland.