The largely dormant issue of Senator Clinton’s gender is moving to the fore in the presidential contest after her campaign complained that her six male Democratic rivals subjected her to a “pile on” at Tuesday’s night debate.

“On that stage in Philadelphia, we saw six against one. Candidates who had pledged the politics of hope practiced the politics of pile on instead,” Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Patricia Solis Doyle, wrote in a fund-raising email to supporters yesterday, one day after releasing a Web video highlighting the same “pile on.”

“She is one strong woman. She came through it well. But Hillary’s going to need your help,” Ms. Solis Doyle wrote.

Mrs. Clinton echoed the gender theme during a speech at Wellesley College yesterday when she spoke about her effort to break into “the old boys’ club of presidential politics.” Her pollster, Mark Penn, warned of indications that female voters could prompt a “backlash” against candidates who challenged Mrs. Clinton. A key supporter, Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, also cast the debate in gender terms. “Six guys against Hillary,” he said. “I’d call that a fair fight.”

“As the other candidates, male candidates, frankly, attack her, it’s not a free shot in terms of how this base of voters may react to that,” a Democratic pollster, Geoffrey Garin, said as he outlined a new poll of women likely to vote in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Garin compared the Philadelphia encounter to a debate in 2000 when Mrs. Clinton’s Republican opponent for the Senate, Rick Lazio, crossed the stage and approached her podium. “People didn’t like it, and women in particular in New York in that election didn’t like it,” the pollster said.

A spokesman for John Edwards, one of the candidates who challenged Mrs. Clinton on Tuesday, said complaints about her being ganged up on were “smoke and mirrors” to divert attention from inconsistent answers she gave during the debate. “That’s not the ‘politics of piling on,’ it’s the politics of parsing,” the aide to Mr. Edwards, Chris Kofinis, said.

The Clinton campaign’s use of gender in its response to the debate could play well in the Democratic primary, in which about 60% of voters are women. However, if such talk alienates men, it could hurt Mrs. Clinton in the general election, where winning male votes will be more critical. A women’s political group that has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, Emily’s List, commissioned the new survey of Democratic women voters in Arizona, Georgia, and New Jersey. In a press release, Emily’s List said the poll found solid support for the New York senator across all demographic groups. The political committee also claimed that the poll showed that “most women won’t choose their presidential nominee based on gender.”

However, 21% of the women surveyed described the fact that Mrs. Clinton would be the first female president as “more important than anything else” about the election, defined as a”10″ on a zero-to-10 scale. Another 31% rated the issue between 6 and 9. According to the poll data, the average answer was 5.48, signaling that the gender issue carries substantial weight with most women who vote in Democratic primaries.