An uphill battle:
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL HINDS Abigail McCarthy AN UPHILL BATTLE THE WORK OF CONGRESSIONAL WIVES The furor over Betty Wright's job must have surprised the special counsel to the House ethics committee. It is...
...To a woman who is the focus of a spotlight during two years of campaigning, as most Senate wives are, and who knows that she has made a valuable contribution, the sudden relegation to the background can be devastating...
...In the 1960s Arvonne Fraser was so shaken by her loss of identity in Washington that she threatened to attend cocktail parties with a book to read and wearing a sandwich board labeling her "wife of Congressman Fraser...
...The situation of the Washington wife is not new...
...Of course, the issues are not just now hitting Congress, but events are highlighting them once again...
...Eighty-one years ago The Congressional Club, a quasi-educational, quasi-social institution, was founded by an act of Congress so that wives would not feel lonely when they accompanied their husbands to the capital...
...Before coming to Washington in the 1960s she was chairwoman of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota and a member of the Minneapolis Welfare Board...
...It was proof of their value that many of them continued to work on a volunteer basis, doing what no one else could do as well...
...Myra McPherson, Washington Post writer, who has authored a book called The Power Lovers about congressional wives-a book which could hardly be called sympathetic to its subjects-wrote with understanding about Betty Wright's situation...
...She wrote that, according to all reports, Mrs...
...A line had been drawn which affected the wives' status and sense of self-worth...
...but where...
...Is it any worse than it would be in New York or even in one-industry towns like Akron...
...But even when I came to Washington in the late 1940s the relatively small congressional salary of $10,000 never quite stretched far enough to cover the cost of two homes and the trips back and forth to the districts and states...
...Now, belatedly, the issues are hitting Congress...
...In Washington the office is all-important and attention gravitates to the officeholder so forcefully that others may feel invisible...
...It was popular legislation-lauded by the always critical press, and pleasing to those constituents who thought that they or their relatives might well be earning the money then going to congressional spouses...
...A few were beginning to sell real estate...
...Other organizations and support groups have multiplied but, as we have lately seen, wives still keenly feel their anonymity and isolation...
...Still, questioning her was seen as casting doubt on working spouses in general and congressional spouses in particular...
...it is hard to say that the speaker's wife was not worth the comparatively small amount she was paid for the advice she claims to have given...
...She noted that in a city where the name of the game is access and former senators can be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for making a few phone calls (remember John Tower's defense...
...she wants to work...
...But is this to be a new line of ethical inquiry: 'What does your wife do for a living...
...Since returning to Minnesota she has served as her party's nominee for lieutenant-governor...
...Having campaigned their husbands' districts and states, they knew the problems and needs as no other employees could...
...The legislation added insult to injury by not exempting the wives who had been working for years-many of them as administrative assistants or directors of district offices...
...In corridors full of tourists hardly a head turned as one of the most recognizable women in the world passed by...
...So little had changed...
...The wives working in their husbands' offices were often invaluable in their service to the constituencies...
...Wright actually did for the $18,000-a-year job with Mal-lightco, and its perquisites of a car and expenses...
...I once walked across the Capitol with Elizabeth Taylor, then a Senate wife, and a few other women on the way to a Red Cross luncheon...
...Is this loss of identity any worse for them than it is for any other wife leaving the home community in which she has, perhaps, been known since childhood and has a somewhat independent life and a separate image...
...Feminist columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, "I understand the opportunities for power-couple corruption...
...Support for Betty Wright came from unexpected quarters...
...Fraser found herself "shaking with fury" as she wrote, remembering all too well her own experience as a congressional wife...
...Is she really doing it...
...It is there, too, in the cases of the most determinedly conventional, old-fashioned spouses of those in lesser office...
...The country has moved toward the two-worker family with all its overlapping, complicated, and somewhat messy problems of two workers and one marriage...
...No matter what the rhetoric of equality, male spouses of women office-holders do not experience the difficulty to the same degree...
...Because they represented the congressmen in a special way, they also had access to agencies of government more easily than did other assistants...
...Today the wives of officials are expected to work, as other wives are, to help defray the expenses of home-buying and educating children if for no other reason...
...The plight of the congressional wife is, in many ways, the plight of all married women writ large, and today's problems surfaced with them long ago...
...It affected all wives whether they worked or not...
...The answer is a reluctant "yes...
...The root of the problem lies, I am afraid, in marriage itself-marriage under twentieth-century conditions-a problem we have not begun to solve.t begun to solve...
...Wright is a capable woman who had to give up a good position on the staff of a congressional committee when she married her husband...
...A congressional spouse who is a lawyer, however, has difficulty finding an area of the law unaffected by legislation on which her husband is required to vote...
...The spouse must work...
...Most worked in their husbands' offices...
...Twenty years later wives like Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri and Janis Berman of California complain that no one takes them seriously or bothers with them...
...It is, of course, almost axiomatic that nepotism is bad, but, in retrospect, this legislation destroyed the concept of a congressional couple working as a team...
...She is widely known as "a person in her own right...
...In the early 1960s the Congress, in a fit of sanctimonious self-policing initiated by some of its newer members, passed legislation forbidding the employment of any family members on congressional staffs...
...She was just one of a bevy of women in a place where few women are important...
...Fraser rose to Betty Wright's defense with an op-ed piece in the New York Times...
...A congressional wife took her identity from her husband but she could not be, in any real sense, his partner...
...Government regulations affect the more traditional fields like education and health care...
...Businesswomen and women working in the media have the same problem...
...It is doubtful that he expected the repercussions which resulted from questioning the reality of her work in the course of his investigation of her husband, Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex...
...Add to this the expectation of most contemporary women that they will be allowed to rise to their full potential in the jobs and professions for which they have been prepared...
...Interestingly enough, many of the working wives were southerners, acting in the tradition of the southern ladies who rallied to the support of their husbands and families in the days of dire poverty after the Civil War...
...It is true that there seems to be little or no record of what Mrs...
...Agood number of wives worked-then, too-at least part time and for the same reason...
...They had influence...
...Arvonne Fraser, wife of former congressman and present mayor of Minneapolis Don Fraser, is currently Senior Fellow on the Women in Public Policy Project at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota...
...We have seen this effect magnified in the case of presidential candidates' wives like Betty Ford, Eleanor McGovern, and Kitty Dukakis...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 11
