It's the kind of Election Day victory I'm sure Hillary Clinton wishes she could have engineered last year.

As local voters took to the polls Tuesday, they elected Stacy Parks Miller as Centre County district attorney and Elizabeth Goreham as State College mayor -- with both women winning by nearly 2-to-1 margins.

Both were the first women elected to their respective posts, and somewhat miraculously, both candidates' gender was a relative non-issue.

That really means something in a country that mass-produced "The Hottest Governor from the Coldest State" buttons during Sarah Palin's candidacy, a country damn near obsessed with Hillary's cackle and Nancy Pelosi's supposed crazy eyes.

We elected two women, and the cut of their pantsuits didn't even enter the public debate.

As Goreham puts it, Centre County elected two "candidates who were female and elected and, hmm, that's interesting."

It's an ideal to strive for nationwide.

When I was a junior in high school, I completed a 10-minute documentary -- along with three of my friends -- on the experiences of American women in elected office. Over the course of a year, we made it a goal to seek out women all over the country, interviewing everyone from celebrity politicians like Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro to obscure ladies like former Lincoln, Neb. mayor Helen Boosalis -- the first female president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

As I sat in the office she kept for herself in a converted farmhouse, former New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman told me the media's constant emphasis on her blouses and hairstyles made her feel like she was running for prom queen, not chief executive of a state of more than eight million people.

Pat Schroeder, the Colorado congresswoman who seriously challenged Michael Dukakis for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, lamented that female politicians were thought of as either too soft or too brittle, too harsh or too feminine -- always "too, too, too, too, too."

And yet somehow Goreham and Parks Miller avoided the all-too-familiar traps set for women in politics.

Goreham chalked it up to "one of the beauties of Happy Valley," but I think it's something slightly less sunny.

Women have fared well for years in local races around the country, only to have the Chris Matthewses and Rush Limbaughs of the world reduce them to crudely drawn caricatures when they dare to run for prominent statewide or national positions.

Somehow having equality claw its way from the bottom up instead of filter down from the top seems like the wrong approach.

Women shouldn't have to earn the right to be critically judged on their qualifications and policy goals -- they should be seen as legitimate candidates from the start.

Stacy Parks Miller won her race because Centre County voters chose change, endorsing the candidate who painted herself as the antithesis of four years of incumbent Michael Madeira.

State College residents picked Elizabeth Goreham because they valued a whipsmart candidate who has spent the last 12 years critically engaged with the borough's most pressing issues over one more than 20 years removed from municipal politics.

And no one criticized the duo as shrill nags or whiny girls or any of the dirty words we like to toss around with women who have the audacity to be strong, powerful, intelligent and electable.

We've engineered ourselves a laudable situation with this election, but the work of those who would fight for a gender-blind America -- or even a gender-blind Centre County -- is far from over.

There are no women on the county's board of commissioners, even though one of its most knowledgeable public servants is director of financial management Denise Elbell. And excepting herself and Parks Miller, Goreham could think of just two other female elected officials in the Centre Region, though there may be more.

Local voters quietly, subtly cracked a regional glass ceiling Tuesday -- an accomplishment made all the more remarkable by the fact that we've hardly acknowledged it.

But we're just one county. Pennsylvania has 66 others, and the United States has more than 3,100.

For much of America, the ceiling still stands, and we shouldn't stand for that.