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Search BarnesandNoble.com for more about Hillary Clinton
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R E C E N T L Y

My Advent adventure
By Anne Lamott
Trying to find the patience and faith of the season when all of God's spokespeople are in bad moods
(12/10/98)

Imaginary friend
By Andrea Cooper
A mother confesses that she would find her 4-year-old's make-believe companion heartwarming if her own mother hadn't talked to imaginary people too
(12/09/98)

Making the list
By Polly Shulman
Your kids might not admit it, but there's a lot to be said for a present whose batteries don't run out and that you can take anywhere
(12/08/98)

Jews for Jesus
By Danny Miller
For my Holy Spirit-possessed sixth-grade teacher, it wasn't enough to sing the songs for our school's Christmas parade, we had to feel them
(12/07/98)

Second Thoughts: Twinns
By Sallie Tisdale
Double your pleasure, double your funn: Create a fantasy version of your child that will stay cute and small long after your kid leaves home and dumps you
(12/03/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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T H E__P R I S O N E R__O F
Pennsylvania Avenue
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The many ordeals of Hillary Clinton should make us ask: Is it time to retire the concept of the first lady?

BY MARGARET TALBOT
The saddest thing I have ever read about Hillary Clinton was the compliment paid her by a young man who saw her give a fund-raising speech in September. The Starr Report had been available to the public for two weeks. The first lady had been touring the country, gamely campaigning on behalf of Democratic congressional candidates for three days. And somewhere along the way, the admiring young man told the New York Times, Hillary Clinton had become "kind of like our American Princess Di."

It was a silly comparison in a way -- poor dead Diana, that Pietà drawn by Keene, and smart, tough, policy-minded Hillary. But you knew what he meant. As different as they were, both women had achieved their greatest popularity in direct proportion to their husbands' philandering. Cast as the embarrassed but unbowed wife in a tabloid triangle, Hillary won higher favorable ratings from American voters than she ever had when she cast herself as an architect of the nation's health-care policy or a children's advocate or even as our working-mother in chief -- an immensely influential woman who, just like you and me, had to slip out of the office early to catch her kid's soccer game. Hillary and Diana were two golden-haired, porcelain-skinned, inscrutably beaming women lashed to the public stage while their husbands were outed as philanderers. The clichéd abjection of the woman scorned washed away both their sins -- Hillary's ambition, Diana's callowness -- but for such redemption, Hillary has, in a way, paid a higher price. She was a politician, not a princess, and was supposed to have had less use for the filigreed archetypes of femininity past.

Now Hillary is a political asset again -- witness her ability to get out the vote for Democrats in November. But it is a curious thing that she owes this latest transformation less to any policy innovation or vision for the future than to the rather fusty idea that men always cheat (they're dogs, remember?), women always suffer, and at least Hillary suffers with class. Her new appeal battens on the kind of dumbed-down politics-free version of feminism that animates many a sitcom girls' night out. The first lady is getting some gushing press these days, but the subtext of, for example, her Vogue photo spread is: See, we thought she was dowdy, but really she's glamorous; we thought she was a hard-headed politico, but really she's a crowd-pleasing celebrity.

Yet it would be too easy -- and not quite fair -- to conclude that Hillary owes her new popularity only to a kind of relief or delight at the spectacle of a powerful woman brought to heel -- "humanized," as the euphemism has it. For what Americans actually said as they were polled and interviewed over and over again about Hillary Clinton's behavior in the eye of the Monica Lewinsky scandal implied a more complicated take. They rallied to her in part because they reviled Kenneth Starr and hated the idea of impeaching her husband, yet could not quite excuse the president's behavior either. Advertising their faith in the first lady was a way of protesting Starr's ham-fisted conflation of the public and private without endorsing Bill Clinton's recklessness. They liked her because she showed "dignity" and "strength" in the face of betrayal and excruciating exposure. Women employed the feminist language of "choice" -- Hillary, they said, "chose" to stay with Clinton -- to try to make sense of her rather pre-feminist fealty to the institution of marriage. They refused to believe that Hillary was a "victim," victim being one of those words so stretched to its limits by identity politics and 12-step culture that many people who might have used it without much thought now feel they must consciously abjure it. ("I don't buy into this victim stuff," a 27-year-old investment banker named Betty Hung told the Washington Post. "I tend to think she knows everything that is going on.") In this sense, they refuted the useful fiction promulgated by the White House that Hillary had not known about her husband's affair with Lewinsky until his speech to the nation in August. In A U.S. News and World Report poll taken the following month, 49 percent of the respondents said they thought of the Clinton's marriage as "a practical business and political relationship," while only 13 percent saw it as "a loving marriage that has its troubles."

You could see these sentiments as a hopeless mish-mash or as an exquisitely calibrated attitude, but either way, there wasn't much gloating about uppity women in them. They embraced a double standard -- but it wasn't a double standard for men and women, it was a double standard for wives and first ladies. In the U.S. News poll, 57 percent of women said they thought Hillary should stay with Bill, but only 36 percent said they would stay with their own partner if he cheated as Bill had. "She may not be behaving as a first wife should behave," said Myrna Blyth, editor in chief of Ladies Home Journal, "but women believe she is behaving like a first lady should behave -- loyal and dignified."

N E X T_ P A G E: The peculiar institution of first ladydom

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