A black man and a white woman competing for the presidential nomination. On Tuesday those of us willing to cast our vote for a Democrat will face this unprecedented choice. It’s a day made all the more momentous for being so jam-packed with primaries. Voters from coast to coast have the chance to feel uncharacteristically invested in the outcome, to feel that their ballots could be the decisive ones.

Of course there have been other elections similarly composed, less exalted yet even more fraught. I know of two previous race vs. gender elections, both from my hometown, Chicago. Here in Los Angeles, where I now live, I think of those elections as I try to see clearly past the signal noise to what is truly at stake in the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton showdown.

The famous – and infamous -- one was the Chicago mayoral race in which Harold Washington beat incumbent Jane Byrne for the Democratic nomination 25 years ago this month, going on to face a white male Republican (sound familiar?) in the general election to become the city’s first (and only) black mayor.

Those old enough to recall the overtly racist tone of that campaign cycle will find the current round of MLK/LBJ innuendo downright mild by comparison. “It’s a racial thing, don’t kid yourself. We’re fighting to keep the city the way it is,” said Alderman E.R. “Fast Eddie” Vyrdolyak, as he campaigned against Washington. Vyrdolyak (with his quintessentially Chicago-esque white ethnic last name) became Washington’s nemesis on the City Council, amassing an opposition bloc that protected the patronage-driven status quo and made it nearly impossible for the mayor to get anything done.

I was 14 then—too young to weigh in with my vote, as I had been during the campaign I witnessed first hand -- the one that launched my mother’s ten year stint as a state representative in the Illinois Legislature. Susan Catania was first elected in 1972, when I was 4, and was forced out just before Washington’s ascendance, when a tight state budget ended a practice that enabled her to slip into office and hang on to her seat in the most unlikely of circumstances for more than a decade.

My mother’s years as a public servant are one of the many knots of my upbringing that I’m only now, on the cusp of 40, beginning to untangle. I’ve long since gone from childish embrace to adolescent rejection and settled on shrugging acceptance, a promissory note for the personal-historical expedition I’m in the midst of now.

        She was in her early 30’s with four children under the age of 5, a degree in chemistry and a job in public relations at a chemical company. After she and my father got married in 1963, they moved to Lake Meadows, a new high-rise housing development on Chicago’s near South Side. Lake Meadows was part of the city’s massive “slum clearance” and subsequent “urban renewal” – a process that began in the 1940’s and continued into the 1970’s -- one of the largest such endeavors this country has ever seen.

The idea was to tear down carefully targeted segments of the ghetto, replacing them with market-rate housing as well as some housing for low-income residents. For those who were displaced, urban renewal promised quality, affordable housing, scattered throughout Chicago, integrated both economically and racially. But the reality looked more like this: tear down slums. Build market-rate housing that few former residents can afford. Build high-density, low-income housing, but not nearly enough, and all together, in one highly concentrated stretch, so that many, many people are forced back into what soon became just the kind of ghetto housing the city was purportedly getting rid of.

Lake Meadows was one of the first market-rate developments. Conceived of and developed as a series of modern, racially integrated apartment buildings, it occupied a 101-acre site a few blocks east of Lake Michigan. Located on the site of a former Civil War internment camp, the area had more recently housed an estimated 3,600 black families. Of those, about 900 qualified for the new -- and initially desirable-- public housing that was being built along State Street half a mile or so west. The rest were on their own.

Beginning in 1958, when the first apartments in the Lake Meadows complex became available, few, if any, of those low-income families could afford to move in. So who did? Middle-class families, black and white, including my own parents, who chose the complex, in part, because the company where my mother had landed her first job was located within walking distance. Moving there, living in close proximity to black people, was as radical an act as either of them had ever undertaken. By the time they got there, any whiff of racial and socio-economic discrimination had vanished. Lake Meadows represented progress and unity.

        At that point in their lives, my parents were apolitical. They were in their early 20’s and had no particular affinity for any party or political ideology. My mother’s grandmother had been a Republican election judge (even before she herself was granted the right to vote in the 1920’s), but her parents were both union members, her father as an industrial pattern-maker and her mother as a home economics teacher in the Chicago public schools. My father’s parents didn’t talk much about politics – his father had been brought to the U.S. from Italy as a baby and his mother, who had been born in Chicago and whose parents were both Italian, was a stay-at-home mother who may well not have even voted until my mother ran for office.

        It was my mother’s job that served as the catalyst for her politicization. She discovered that a male colleague whom she’d trained was being paid more than she, so she quit and filed a sex-discrimination lawsuit. Pregnant with her fourth child, she traveled to the state capitol in Springfield to testify on some legislation to repeal a law that said pregnant women were ineligible for unemployment compensation for three months before their babies was born and four weeks after, because they were incapable of working. During that time, if a company happened to lay a woman off, she would be denied unemployment benefits.

My mother, having worked right up to the due date of her three previous children (including me) and having gone back to work very shortly thereafter each time, knew this law to be ridiculous and unjust, not to mention a convenient way for unscrupulous employers to avoid having to pay unemployment compensation.

        But when my visibly pregnant mother appeared before the subcommittee to testify, the all-male, cigar-puffing panel treated her as an entertainment, with one member asking whether this were a “labor” bill and another wondering “if anyone ever considered the problem of a woman getting pregnant as the result of an industrial accident.” Not easily deterred, my mother returned to testify twice more as the bill moved through the legislative process. On her third visit, a companion pointed out her state legislator – an elderly black man whom, she noticed, slept through the entire hearing.

        Though the law was not repealed, my mother’s testimony helped enact legislation that shifted the burden of proof to the employer, who had to demonstrate that the pregnant employee (and later new mother) was incapable of working.

        Meanwhile she’d begun to put two and two together: changing state law was an exhilarating experience, one she wouldn’t mind repeating, and she knew her discrimination lawsuit would make finding another job more than a little bit of a challenge, especially now that she had four young children.

One of the legislators with whom she’d worked (and one of only three women in the State Legislature at the time) suggested that she run for a seat herself. She thought it was a great idea, but when she talked with a neighbor who worked on political campaigns, he laughed --for a long time. When he realized she was serious, he told her she’d have no chance breaking in as a Democrat, since the entire operation was controlled by the political machine of Mayor Richard Daley (the first) and suggested she consider running as a Republican.

Because of the arcane workings of the electoral process in Illinois (and in an effort to maintain some party balance), a practice called “cumulative voting” gave the minority party one legislative seat in each district (the majority party got two). It didn’t matter how few votes the candidate received, so long as he or she got the most of any candidate running in that party.

        The notion of running as a Republican gave my mother pause, if only for a moment. She’d been born and raised on the South Side, where members of the Grand Old Party was as rare as integrated swimming pools. But it didn’t take her long to overcome her hesitation. Chicago – meaning the Democrats— sustained a long tradition of political corruption, none of it to the advantage of the nearly all-black 22^nd legislative district where she lived. The Democrats seeking higher public office in the state were an equally scurrilous bunch. In any case, she reasoned, she had her own agenda rooted in helping the community. When she looked at it that way, party affiliation hardly mattered at all.

        Her opposition was incumbent Genoa Washington, the man she’d seen sleeping through the hearing in Springfield. Washington had been one of the first black graduates of Northwestern Law School and an accomplished legislator. But his health was declining – he had terminal cancer – and it was clear to my mother that he wasn’t an effective public servant. The Republican ward committeemen agreed to endorse my mother for a “handling” fee of $100 for each of the district’s 153 precincts. When she refused to pay, three additional candidates appeared on the Republican primary ballot, all of them black (my mother was the only white candidate to run for the seat during her entire tenure).

The first was a phantom candidate called “Earle Sardon,” a man no one had ever seen or heard of -- reporters who called my mother for interviews would ask if she knew how to get in touch with him. The second was Bessie Daniels, a black woman whose presence on the ballot was intended to split the female vote. When my mother reviewed the qualifying signatures on Daniels’ petitions, she found evidence of “roundtabling,” an all-too-common practice in those days in which a few pol operators sat around a table and passed the petitions around and around, filling them out into the wee hours. In this case they must have suffered a failure of imagination, having written the same names on page after page. Once my mother brought the irregularity to the attention of the Election Commission, Daniels’ candidacy was rendered invalid.

        That left Washington, my mother and a third candidate, another black man who managed to do some campaigning, though he was no match for my mother. Her heart set on winning, Susan Catania  took on the task with characteristic zeal.

With the phony candidates out of the way, she turned her attention to the search for Republican constituents. In a district in which most of the city’s public housing was concentrated, and in which the occupants of non-public housing were unlikely to welcome a stranger on their stoop, door-to-door campaigning was not much of an option. Those were pre-computerized days, and she spent months wedged into Vault 13 under the watchful eye of a man with a cane and a cigar on floor 3-M at City Hall -- a short floor that was quite possibly the inspiration for floor 7 ½ in “Being John Malkovich.”

For her labors she was rewarded with the names of between six and eight registered Republicans per precinct, for a grand total of between 918 and 1,224 potential supporters.

        That was enough to get a network going. Someone would hold a “coffee” in their living room and invite a few friends, one or two of whom would agree to host the next gathering, and so on. By the time the primary rolled around, my mother managed to come in second, which was all she needed to win a spot on the general election ballot in the fall.

        Then, three and a half weeks before the general election, Genoa Washington died. The Republican kingmakers immediately replaced his name on the ballot with that of one William O. Stewart, a local pol whose campaign consisted of pointing out that he was black and my mother was not, and that he was a lifelong resident of the district and she was not. It was an effective strategy for a man unknown to voters until the 11^th hour, but my mother’s efforts paid off and she won, by the narrowest of margins.

        In January of 1973, my sisters and I, clad in matching itchy pink and green French wool ensembles, attended our first inauguration, and my mother embarked on her decade as a legislator. At the beginning some critics faulted her for holding on to a seat that could have served as a training ground for a promising young black pol. But over time those voices faded, as she built an impeccable record as a champion of civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights.

        Susan Catania never viewed her race or her gender as barriers -- or her political party for that matter --never felt she had anything to apologize for. Throughout her years in the legislature she remained true to her original purpose, representing her constituents, never bowing to political pressure or compromise. It was an impressive stance, and good for the district, but it won her few friends among those who might have bankrolled and otherwise supported her later attempts to win elective office. When cumulative voting came to an end so did her career as a public servant.

        Having lived inside a campaign skewed by race and gender so early in my life, having witnessed firsthand the dealmaking endemic to political efficacy and having watched my mother navigate that terrain so remarkably and reject it so completely, I’m finding it hard to know where to cast my vote in this historic presidential primary. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama live up to the standards my mother set. For me a vote for either one is a compromise.