We will remember the narrative of Massachusetts senatorial election in facial terms: Scott Brown’s rugged, graying boyishness contrasted against Martha Coakley’s nervous, wide-eyed professionalism. Election results came in with 52% for the beaming grin, 47% for the defeated gape.

In the aftermath of the campaign, which began early last fall after the death of the revered Senator Edward Kennedy, Coakley has been described by The New York Times as an “exceptionally weak candidate” and chastised by Newsweek for “showcasing herself as a woman candidate—as opposed to a candidate who happened to be a woman.”

Most analyses were armed with 20/20 hindsight and ignored the fact that, just a few days before, Coakley was widely considered a completely viable candidate. She was first to announce her intention to run—in the same hotel in which John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the same seat in 1952—and was the highest fundraiser out of the major contenders. In the primaries, she swiftly dispatched her four Democratic challengers and stayed ahead for weeks. On January 11, eight days before the election, she held a formidable 50-36 lead over her square-jawed opponent, who was still an obscure state senator with a series of goofy television commercials.

Then—gaffe by gaffe—it all fell apart. First, she mistakenly referred to prominent Brown supporter Curt Shilling as a Yankee fan, despite the fact that he pitches for the Red Sox. The next week the campaign released a commercial criticizing Brown’s voting record in the State Senate that misspelled Massachusetts. While Brown pressed the flesh with thousands of voters, she was quoted in The Boston Globe scoffing at his face-to-face campaigning. (“Standing outside at Fenway? In the cold? Shaking hands?”) Three days before the election, the woman every Democrat from Newton to Northampton believed would be their next Senator was swirling the drain.

It’s silly to ponder hypotheticals, but with just a few extra percentage points, Coakley would have become the first female United States Senator from a state that has traditionally been icy toward its female politicians. Until the election of Congresswoman Niki Tsongas—the widow of popular Senator Paul Tsongas—in 2007, Massachusetts had gone 25 years without a female representative in Washington, 35 without a female Democrat. Every woman who has run for governor in Massachusetts has lost. (Jane Swift, the Bay State’s only female governor lasted only a year and a half, promoted from Lieutenant Governor after former Governor Paul Celucci resigned.) For a state with a progressive streak wider than the Charles River, Massachusetts has elected few Democratic women to state and national offices, and few Democratic women have run for major offices; many women campaigning for office have been moderate Republicans pushed forth by the state’s puny GOP, like 2006 gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey.

Jonathan Parker, the political director of EMILY’s List — a political action committee that helps pro-choice democratic women get elected to major offices—doesn’t believe Coakley’s loss will discourage women from running, but that it does indicate the difficulty of electing Democratic women to major offices. “It’s all part of the same struggle,” he said. Nationally and regionally, it’s neither a turning point for women running for office, nor a regressive slide.

This is true of Rhode Island’s famously inbred and corrupt politics, which are even less hospitable to female candidates that those of its bigger New England cousins. (Superficial evidence: Wikipedia’s “Women in Rhode Island Politics” category bears a scant three names). But twenty-five years ago, it looked like this was going to turn around. Claudine Schneider, Rhode Island’s first, and to-date only, female representative in Congress, was elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican in 1981. Three years later Rhode Island nun-turned-attorney Arlene Violet became the first female state Attorney General in the country. This burst of girl-power petered out by the 1990s, when Violet and Schneider returned to private life. It wasn’t until Elizabeth Roberts (B’78) was elected Lieutenant Governor in 2007 that Rhode Island had a woman in major office once again.

Rhode Island’s track record for electing women to smaller offices is equally dismal. Women make up a tiny 17% of state-wide office. Although a woman, Teresa Paiva-Weed, heads it, the General Assembly only has 22 female representatives out of 125. The state’s Senate and House of Representatives have 8 and 17 women, respectively. The Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts- Boston, which tracks the progress of women in New England politics, called Rhode Island’s record of women’s political representation “one of limited gains for women at both the state legislative and federal levels.”

Part of the historic lack of female politicians in states like New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Massachusetts is the sheer lack of open seats. Until Brown, Massachusetts hasn’t had a new Senator since John Kerry, 25 years ago. Connecticut hasn’t had an open Senate seat in twenty years. Vermont’s senior Senator has held his position since 1975. New England breeds lifers, and lifers make it hard to women to seek office.

“It’s a challenge in a lot of states to get women elected to higher office,” Parker said. “The opportunities have to be there.” In New England, he added, “you’ve got people who have been in office for a long, long time and it’s harder for women to crack those old networks.”

Which isn’t to say that things can’t turn around. When the rare, coveted spots open up, EMILY’s List and similar groups like the White House Project zero in on the opportunity and on potentially viable candidates. In Vermont right now, EMILY’s List is firmly backing the current Secretary of State, Deb Markowitz, in her bid to become the state’s second female governor. The group also backed Elizabeth Roberts when she considered running for Governor of Rhode Island, and will back Gina Raimondo to become the state treasurer. They have high hopes for Ann McLane Kuster to take over Paul Hodes’ congressional seat in New Hampshire’s second district, which would make the state’s delegation majority-female.

“There are a lot of up-and-coming women candidates (in New England),” Parker said. “There are some real stars there.”

In the flurry over Obama’s historic presidency, many people didn’t notice that there were more women elected to Congress in 2008 than in any other year besides 1992—dubbed the “Year of the Woman” by the Washington Post. There are more women in Congress than ever before, but they still only make up only 17 percent of Congress. This is evident watching the State of the Union, where it’s hard to spot the brightly-colored St. John’s Bay skirt-suits peppered throughout the sea of dark coats and ties, but not impossible.

Regionally, this decade has not been entirely without gains for women politicians. New Hampshire elected their first female United States Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, and elected a majority-female state senate. Maine held on to two woman Senators. Rhode Island elected their first female Lieutenant Governor. And despite her failed bid to become Massachusetts’s first woman senator, Martha Coakley is still the state’s first and only female Attorney General and the state’s only female constitutional officer.

Things can go horribly wrong in Democratic or Republican campaigns, and in campaigns of male or female candidates. When more women run for office, more women win and more lose. It would be dishonest to blame failed campaigns like Coakley’s on gender politics or sexism because a whole swarm of circumstances and failures cost her the election. Her gender may not have even cracked the top five.

But with two men representing Massachusetts in the Senate for the 234th consecutive year, it’s a reminder that there is still ample room for more cracks in the glass ceiling, and more St. John’s Bay skirt-suits in our state and national offices.