Whose turn is it?

DULUTH - Democrats are walking on tiptoe, with eyes averted from the elephant in the room.

They have two viable candidates for the presidential nomination. If voters in Texas and Ohio don't settle this match, Democrats might be headed for sudden-death convention overtime.

If that happens, why not give that elephant a sharp kick? Why not ask aloud the question no one will admit asking? All things being equal, which "first" should go first: an African-American, or a woman?

There are two reasons to pick the woman.

First, it's her turn.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, women had been asking for the right to vote for over a decade. They stopped asking during the war, out of respect for the war effort. Most assumed that the nation's men would thank and emancipate women at the same time that they thanked and emancipated slaves. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it, men who "believed that God made one race all booted and spurred and another to be ridden ... cannot live on the same continent with a pure democracy." By the same token, a democratic nation that had purged itself of slavery would also have to purge itself of patriarchy.

Victoria Woodhull was similarly convinced that race and sex emancipation were two sides of the same coin. So much so that in 1872 she became the first woman to run for president. She didn't win.

After the war, Congress freed the slaves. Then it thanked black men for bearing arms against the Confederacy and turned them into citizens. As black men were enfranchised, women again bit their tongues.

Legislators didn't thank women. They made them wait 52 more years. All the while, they explained that they could see in the black soldier a political partner. But women citizens lacked the chops and native intelligence to keep the nation safe. And anyway, the right to vote had never been a right of citizenship.

It was a bad choice. Women are the canaries in the mine; societies that cut off rights for women -- half the population -- end up hurting the other half. Societies that oppress women, condone violence toward them or deny to them economic security tend to be more unstable, with lower standards of living, reduced life expectancies and lower income and education levels.

This leads to the second reason to pick the woman.

History suggests that women's status is the litmus test for a society's commitment to freedom. A society can preserve discrimination only if it can rationalize inequality -- usually by appealing to something that cannot be changed, like biology or nature.

For example, when white Americans were forced to defend slavery -- and then Jim Crow segregation, poverty and persecution -- they sighed, looked to the heavens and claimed that nature and God's will had tied their hands. God cruelly had handed blacks a biological defect called inferiority. They would always draw the short straw and the raw deal.

In 2008, few people still believe that biology is the reason black citizens are the last hired, first fired, and generally the first to be convicted or evicted. Sure, there are degenerates who still trot out black jokes at cocktail parties (and sometimes throw in a battered woman joke for good measure). But they aren't men you'd shake hands with.

Yet many still blame biology when women draw the short straw -- as every index of social, economic and political power shows they do in 2008.

When a woman quits her job because her supervisor won't give her time off to care for a sick child, we say that she has followed her "natural" instincts to mother. We don't ask whether the problem is her supervisor. What if he is just following his instincts to be a jerk? When women are sexually assaulted or beaten by husbands at home, we wring our hands and lament that men are biologically prone to aggression. Heavy sighs all around.

In fact, ideas about gender difference helped the nation perfect arguments for social inequality in general. Gender inequality is thus the deepest cave into which discriminators can retreat. When they come out -- and they always come out -- they'll be saying the same thing to the next victims of discrimination that men said to women after the Civil War. Cheer up. It's nothing personal. It's in your nature.

So pick the woman. Seal up that cave.

Jennifer Imsande is associate director of the Center for Advocacy and Political Leadership at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.