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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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THE PRISONER OF PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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The truth is that the Di-ification of Hillary is not a litmus test for attitudes toward working mothers or strong wives, not a metaphor for backlash. It owes as much to the peculiar institution of first ladydom as it does to ambivalence about how the rest of us balance our lives. And that institution, with all its whalebone strictures, owes as much to the mediagenic, post-partisan politics of our era as it does to gender roles. This is worth remembering because there are so many people -- not least Hillary herself -- invested in having us believe otherwise. Throughout her White House tenure, Hillary Clinton has shown a willingness to take the image of the working mother and the baby-boomer feminist down with her. She has repeatedly defended herself against legitimate criticism -- of her handling of Whitewater and Travelgate, her role in the health-care debacle -- by crying sexism or allowing others to cry it for her. She has called herself a "Rorschach" for attitudes toward working moms, and her defenders have often made much the same point.

"She's an icon," people will say of Hillary, perhaps not knowing exactly what they mean -- but then there are plenty of partisan types to fill in the content for them. "The attempted character assassination of Hillary," wrote feminist historian Ruth Rosen in a typical defense of the first lady, "is simply one more battle in the gender wars." This is by no means an absurd line of argument. We have, in our culture, a kind of underground reservoir of misogyny that can easily be tapped for specific political purposes. This misogyny traffics in certain atavistic images of conniving, emasculating womanhood -- Delilahs, harpies, succubi. (Under synonyms for "evil-doer," my thesaurus contains seven specifically male terms and 18 specifically female ones, including "hellhag," "hellcat" and the charming-despite-itself "bitch-kitty.") And so it was no surprise that, during the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary quickly acquired the sobriquet "the Lady Macbeth of Arkansas." (The conservative American Spectator magazine seems to have been the first to attach it to her, but it stuck.)

The key to these sorts of insults -- what clues you in to their folkloric status, their kinship to the antisemitism of Eastern European villagers or the fear of goblins -- is that they are almost always self-contradictory, a panicky catalog of iniquity. Thus, the targeted woman can be both a man-hating lesbian and a sexually insatiable man trap, a rigid ideologue with a single-minded mission and a shape-shifting political machinator. These stereotypes tend to be deployed more often against influential first ladies than against female politicians -- perhaps because it is easier to demonize wives in sexual terms and perhaps because Americans have a legitimate discomfort with people who acquire political power through their bedmates. And though they may seem to overlap with a socially conservative agenda, such sentiments do not belong solely to the right. Nancy Reagan -- probably the most vilified first lady in postwar history, whatever Hillary's partisans may say -- was denounced as a "dragon lady" by plenty of good liberals, and Rosalynn Carter took a drubbing from feminists for having achieved her influence through marriage. ("You were handed an assignment simply because you were the wife of the president," reporter Judy Woodruff upbraided Rosalynn when the first lady returned from a political tour of Latin America in 1977. "Isn't that kind of a setback for the women's movement?") And the fact that fears of female power persist and sometimes take political form does not mean that they represent mainstream political opinion or even the well-considered opinion of social conservatives. Such misogyny is at once deeper and less efficacious than it might appear.

Surely when we consider what it is that has cut Hillary Clinton down to size, what has helped to make her more beloved as a first-wives club kind of gal-pal than in any of her more ambitious or unorthodox guises, we have to think about first ladydom itself. The rise of the presidential couple is a recent phenomenon and not one to be taken for granted. Before the mid-20th century, first ladies were certainly written and gossiped about, but they were not seen as politically necessary adjuncts to their husbands. The occasional widower or bachelor (Thomas Jefferson, Martin van Buren, James Buchanan) could make it to the White House; it's almost impossible to imagine a man without a wife, and preferably a display-quality wife, doing so today. In the 19th century, the first lady's chief duty was to serve as the White House hostess -- a mandate whose limited scope is apparent in the fact that an unmarried sister or daughter could just as easily do the honors when a wife was absent or invalided. Elizabeth Monroe suffered from one of those unspecified 19th century ailments that kept her confined to her bed much of the time, so her daughter Eliza often filled in for her. The press grumbled and made unflattering comparisons to the vivacious Dolly Madison, but there were no political consequences for Monroe.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first presidential wife to reimagine the role from the inside, using her status as Franklin's "eyes and ears" to carve out an independent mission for herself as a crusader for the poor and the downtrodden. But it was pressure from the outside -- most of all from the rise of the mass media and celebrity culture -- that transformed the first lady into a necessary campaign asset and the first family into a marketable commodity. Harry Truman was the first president to make a practice of incorporating his wife and child into campaign appearances. In 1948, on a whistle-stop tour of the United States, he took to bringing Bess and their daughter Margaret out on the rear of the train with the introduction "Howja like to meet my family?" The matronly and retiring Bess was "the boss," the more glamorous Margaret was the "boss's boss." It was a calculated joke -- the humor and the safety of it lay in the fact that Bess could in no real way be construed as "the boss" and the calculation lay in the fact that calling her "the boss" implied that Truman had a civilizing, feminine influence at home, a renewable source of Midwestern moral uplift. Neither woman ever spoke, but Bess perfected the glazed convention-hall smile of the candidate's wife -- trained first and most intensely on the husband and only then on his cheering supporters. (As Germaine Greer points out, "the gaze" tells us the wife is there for him, "miming" a subservience and self-abnegation she may or may not feel, while he is there only for us: "He may place a hand on her waist or shoulder but, though her eyes must be turned to him, his eyes must be turned to the public.") The "Truman Ladies" soon became "a presidential trademark," essential to the president's appeal, Newsweek concluded, and there was no retreat to anonymity or independence for first ladies after that.

"Today, spouses often do what political parties once did, helping to define the country's leader in an accessible, standard shorthand," writes historian Gil Troy in a penetrating book called "Affairs of State: The Rise and Rejection of the Presidential Couple since World War II." "As partisan identity declined, presidents instinctively offered up their wives to help forge ties with millions of voters in this mass democracy. As a result, modern presidential couples have been pressured more intensively than ever to embody an ideal" -- of the deferential helpmeet with no career other than her husband's to tend, the grateful and wholesome and attractive children -- "at a time when this same ideal has been both repudiated and revered."

N E X T_ P A G E: "A first lady cannot do anything right"

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