‘They’re telling us we’ve got this one, Alice,’’ I said quietly as I stood in front of Alice Paul’s old house on Capitol Hill the night before the election. In 1920, Paul engineered the ratification of the 19th Amendment to our Constitution, ensuring that women in every state could vote.

The polls said we were about to elect our first female president, but my gut told me something else. Two potential hidden votes nagged at me — a possible “Brexit’’ vote by Americans who felt disenfranchised by globalization, and an anti-Clinton pushback by voters who still weren’t comfortable with a woman as commander in chief.

Contrary to everything the pundits told us, Election 2016 actually played out as one would expect, given our history and constitutional design. The American presidency is a consolidated executive office that combines the head of state, head of government, and commander-in-chief functions in a single person. The aim was to ensure that the executive would be strong enough to protect the young nation. But this “agentic,’’ or masculine, model of the executive differs from most other western democracies — many of which have already had female leaders — and tends to reinforce gender stereotypes about leadership.

During the campaign, Donald Trump capitalized on the intersection of this agentic executive model and gender stereotypes, or “schemas,’’ that voters hold about a male or female candidate’s “fit’’ in terms of the presidency. He said Hillary Clinton didn’t look presidential. He also raised doubts about whether military leaders would accept her as their boss. One might expect that message to resonate with male voters, but what about female voters, many of whom voted for Trump? Ask any social psychologist and they’ll tell you that women voters share those same gender schemas about women. This phenomenon, and the fact that their economic security is closely tied to that of their husbands, helps explains why noncollege-educated women voted for Trump in significant numbers.

Still, women did make some progress in this election. In prior cycles, voters associated male candidates much more strongly with foreign policy and female candidates with domestic policy issues. This time, perceptions were split. More voters thought Clinton was stronger on foreign policy. However, voters still felt that Trump was more capable of keeping them safe from terrorism. And though Trump’s strength among noncollege- educated white voters carried him to victory in key Electoral College states, Clinton won the national popular vote.

Women also made progress in the Senate with the election of the first Latina, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and the first Indian-American woman, Kamala Harris of California.

The fight for women’s full citizenship has never been easy. Susan B. Anthony was arrested and put on trial for voting, and Alice Paul was denounced as unpatriotic and jailed for picketing the White House. Anthony and Paul’s suffrage movement was dominated by elite white women, many of whom were classist and racist. As soon as the 19th Amendment was ratified, in 1920, those divisions erupted. Progressives like Florence Kelley openly revolted when Paul began an effort to introduce an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923. And Paul herself split from the mainstream suffrage movement over disagreements about strategy and tactics. So divisions among American women in political matters have been the historical norm rather than the exception.

I told my students the day after the election to take heart and to stay the course. In 1916, universal suffrage for women was still a distant hope. Yet by the election of 1920, all American women could vote. In four short years, Alice Paul had turned the tide and the 19th Amendment had been ratified.

Paul used to say the movement for women’s full citizenship was like a mosaic: We all add a little piece. I haven’t been back to her home on Capitol Hill, now the Belmont-Paul National Monument, since the election. But the next time I visit, I’ll tell Alice that, though we put some pieces in that mosaic on Nov. 8, we still have a few more to go.

Paula Monopoli is the Sol and Carlyn Hubert Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law.