What Do Women Want? Read Free

sent a clear signal to American women: “Back off. The time is not yet ripe.” 3 This was to be phase two in the Hillary saga. And it ushered in the silent Laura Bush.
    HRC had initially insisted on her right to be powerful, self-protective, and strong. She didn’t buy into female role-playing. She refused to look weak. In short, she broke the rules decreed for political wives—and for her pioneering she was nearly banished from the public eye during the second presidential campaign.
    Even as late as two minutes before the last American presidential election of the twentieth century (November 1996), Hillary Rodham Clinton was still the most problematic first lady America had ever known—admired abroad, hated at home, mistrusted by women journalists even though the Clinton administration had actually done more for American women than any administration in our history. She was suspected of being a megalomaniac, accused of perjury, document-losing, spy-hiring, and responsible for the suicide of an aide conjectured to be her lover.
    Interestingly, none of these charges materialized as fact. Though HRC was pilloried in the press and jeered at in political cartoons, though she was distrusted even by her admirers, she stood up to her detractors as we all must. She put health care, the rights of children, and the rights of women on the national agenda—no small feats.
    Back in 1996 (aeons ago where politics is concerned), I had written an article for the New York Observer in which I argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the latest victim of America’s hatred of talented, clever women who do nothing to disguise their talent and cleverness. When William Safire of the New York Times called HRC a “congenital liar” surely he was subjecting her to a different standard than the one to which he had held other first ladies. Isn’t social white lying one of the roles of the first lady? Can anyone in the laser glare of the public eye be expected to be candid all the time? Did anyone ask Pat Nixon what she thought of her husband’s destruction of evidence, or Jackie Kennedy what she thought of her husband’s affairs? Was Nancy Reagan interrogated about Iran-gate? But HRC’s gene pool was impugned at the drop of a document. Clearly she was being put in an impossible double bind: asked to play Marie Antoinette and Madame Defarge at the same time. Nobody could have succeeded at this—not even the most talented actress. For it is true that when we wish women to fail, we decree for them endless and impossible ordeals, like those devised for witches by their inquisitors. If they drown, they are innocent; if they float, they are guilty. This has pretty much been the way America has always tried to get rid of its cleverest political women, from Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman to Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton. And there was no doubt that many people wished HRC ill. She represented the new woman of the twenty-first century, the woman our daughters want to be. Before she got dumbed down and blurred pink and blue around the edges for the 1996 Democratic National Convention (in response to Elizabeth Dole’s southern sugar-baby act), she didn’t see any reason to hide her brains; she expected to run for the presidency as her husband’s full and equal partner; she saw no need to prate of cookery and coiffures (no matter how often she nervously changed her hair).
    In the days of “Elect Hillary’s Husband in ’92,” Hillary Rodham Clinton had adamantly refused the obligatory Stepford wife impersonation, the fake flirtatiousness that makes political wives seem safe, the willingness to pretend to be the power behind the throne. When America was not ready for her—preferring the duplicitous southern charms of Mrs. Dole—Hillary temporarily retreated into pastels and pearls. Duplicity in women still makes America comfortable, straightforwardness does not.
    So Hillary Clinton fell victim to America’s discomfort with powerful