“It feels good,” Couric said of her post-CBS freedom in a phone interview. “But I’m sort of a serious working girl, so I’ll be happy when I figure out my next move.”

She is going to do something that “allows me to be my authentic self,” she said. This would not be reality TV. No “Real Anchors of Manhattan.” Let’s stomp out that rumor before it starts. She hopes to do a program involving conversation and “tackling complicated subjects and making them accessible.”

Couric’s tenure at CBS News got mixed grades. She put together some memorable reports, led of course by the historic Sarah Palin interview. Palin was exactly the kind of candidate who could be revealed in all her ineptitude only by a seemingly unthreatening questioner who sat there looking interested, and a little worried, as the garbled answers flowed.

But innovations like a “free speech” segment flopped — apparently nobody at CBS knew that letting volunteer outsiders have their say was 10 times more time-consuming than putting paid staff on the air. And the “Evening News” didn’t climb out of its long-running position at the bottom of the ratings. “I’m disappointed I couldn’t help with the ratings more,” Couric said. “I’ve been No. 1 and I’ve been No. 3. It’s more fun to be No. 1.”

From my perspective as a charter of the progress of American women, Couric was a total success. The first great mandate for a First Woman is not to screw things up for the Second Woman or the Third. On that count, Couric did great. She was under incredible scrutiny and pressure, and she held up her end. There was never a point at which American viewers turned to each other and said: “Well, that certainly didn’t work out.”

When she first got the job, Couric said, she was told that 9 percent of viewers polled didn’t want to watch a woman in the anchor job and 4 percent had mixed feelings. That’s not a humongous proportion of the watching public, but within the world of television ratings, it’s quite a chunk.

Now, people don’t even really notice. Couric made it unremarkable to turn on the television news and see a woman sitting in the chair of authority. And when the time came for ABC to find a new anchor and there was no longer a novelty premium in picking a woman, Diane Sawyer was chosen because she was clearly just the best person for the job. The follow-through is critical when it comes to these pathbreaking stories, so there are really two heroines here. The danger of first-woman-ness is that it doesn’t always lead anywhere.

Rummage through American history and you will find all sorts of exceptional women who had amazing achievements that never created any echo. We generally celebrate Margaret Brent, a colonist in 17th-century Maryland, as the first woman lawyer in America. She not only brought cases to court, she virtually ran the colony during one period of exceptional crisis, when the place was filled with unpaid soldiers ready to run amok and Brent was the only thing standing between the settlers and chaos. She saved the day, but she didn’t inspire any Maryland women of the next generation to follow her into court. Also, when things calmed down the Maryland Assembly refused to give her the right to vote.

You know you’ve won when things become routine. There are no women on the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour, which is currently orbiting in space. But I didn’t know that until I checked. There could well have been. More than 50 women have flown in space, 48 of them for NASA, where a spokesman once said back in the ’60s that “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.”

There was a time, children, when having a woman anchor the evening news seemed like an unobtainable holy grail. You could barely find a female face on news shows at all, let alone sitting in the seat of authority at the anchor desk.

“I have the strong feeling that audiences are less prepared to accept the news from a woman’s voice than from a man’s,” said the president of NBC News in 1971. The whole idea seemed so improbable that the networks tried to hedge their bets. ABC made a disastrous attempt to pair Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner, who did not want to be paired at all — and refused, Walters said, to talk to her when they were off air. CBS’s attempt at a Dan Rather-Connie Chung duo in 1993 was equally disastrous.

What was needed, obviously, was the chance to let a woman fill the chair on her own. Now, that’s just normal life. TV news might not be the central part of American culture it was back in the day, but Couric and Sawyer have given us a real success story. Margaret Brent would have been pleased.