Back in 1993, a young woman named Shannon Faulkner filed suit against the Citadel, then an all-male military college, after it accepted her application only to reverse course upon learning her sex. Ms. Faulkner, who prevailed in the lawsuit, was championed and feted by theNational Organization for Women and women’s magazines and generally considered a gutsy young model of feminist derring-do.

Then she got there.

After four hours of military indoctrination on the Citadel campus in Charleston, S.C., Ms. Faulkner checked into the infirmary, where she spent most of a week before dropping out of the school altogether, citing acute stress and anxiety.

Shannon Faulkner’s story came to mind on Thursday with the news that Caroline Kennedy had withdrawn her name from consideration for the United States Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s elevation to secretary of state.

Maybe it was a tax problem that inspired Ms. Kennedy’s change of heart, or maybe it was a housekeeper problem, or maybe, as initially suggested, it did have something to do with the poor health of her uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, who has brain cancer and collapsed at President Obama’s inaugural lunch this week. Maybe Gov. David A. Paterson had settled on someone else and Ms. Kennedy wanted to save herself the embarrassment of the also-ran. Or maybe it was just the acute stress and anxiety that anyone running for office is pretty much inviting into her life.

Whatever the reason, Ms. Kennedy spent some long hours on Wednesday in the infirmary of indecision, and then dropped out for good.

To many women in midlife, one of the more appealing aspects of Ms. Kennedy’s bid for public office was highly personal: Here was a woman poised to show that you could devote your 30s to raising children and yet have an impressive, challenging second act. Not only would a Senate appointment make clear that possibility, but Ms. Kennedy would have the chance to prove, by demonstrating competency or even excellence once in office, that sometimes it’s worth taking a risk bestowing a plum assignment on a smart, well-educated woman whose experience doesn’t perfectly line up on the résumé.

Why didn’t Ms. Kennedy’s experience line up? Because, in addition to writing books, she was devoting time to her family, a choice that everyone seems to value and embrace — everyone, typically, except the future employers who are looking at the résumés.

Because of her universal name recognition, Ms. Kennedy was going to have the chance to make the point that midlife career ambition can pay off for mommy-tracked women if they only have the intelligence and drive to make it happen.

For women looking for that inspiration, however, Ms. Kennedy was never really an ideal place to start. The problem with celebrity role models is that they’re celebrities — they get opportunities and breaks that the rest of us don’t.

A 50ish stay-at-home mother looking to Caroline Kennedy for career inspiration is a little bit like your average suburban mother of twins looking to J. Lo for tips on how to lose that baby weight.

It was a little troubling at the outset, when people close to Ms. Kennedy suggested that a family emergency (the words employers dread hearing most from their female employees), namely Senator Kennedy’s collapse, was the reason she was pulling out.

If a male political contender had said that, everyone would have just dismissed it as the laziest of lines, a tired cliché that practically announces dirty laundry. When a woman says it, it seems at least plausible, but also a confirmation of the suspicion that women who spent their 30s on family probably will never really be able to put a career first.

Whatever the reason Ms. Kennedy dropped out, there’s a little bit of that Shannon Faulkner story line to her trajectory — someone who aimed high, got close, and then ducked out, dashing some women’s hopes, for reasons that might have confirmed their doubters’ least flattering assumptions. It was harder than she thought, more grueling, more invasive, and she decided she didn’t really want it — or at least, in Ms. Kennedy’s case, not enough to defend whatever she had done in managing her household help.

Given how much she has irritated the governor’s office — Mr. Paterson’s aides seem to be fighting, in the news media, to be seen as the ones who did the dumping — Ms. Kennedy, for all her charm, education and pedigree seems to have lacked the flair for the sensitive two-steps of political life.

Maybe she was starting to sense that. Or maybe, after attending President Obama’s inauguration, she had started to sense that this moment was not hers — that what people are really embracing, in the new president and his family, is the flat-out miracle of their rise through a meritocracy.

The spectacle of the Obama family’s success would be heartening at any point in history. But people probably never need to believe in the self-made man or woman more than when they’re feeling broke and scared.

The son of an out-of-work contractor can hope for a crack someday at a Senate seat, knowing that the stepgrandson of a woman who lives in a metal-roofed shack is moving into the White House.

At the time that Shannon Faulkner cut bait, many feminists thought she’d let women down, but now 6 percent of the Citadel student body is female.

Ms. Faulkner stepped aside, but made way for other tough women to leave their mark. Maybe Caroline Kennedy, intentionally or not, is doing the very same thing.