Feminist pundits to task for treating Hillary Clinton too gently
Bronstein, Zelda
When Erica Jong's hymn to Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared in the Nation last November, it was only the latest in a series of feminist tributes to the First Lady. In a March 1993 double salute to...
...Clinton again...
...The whole chain of command was out of whack...
...In his New York Times column, Safire had called Mrs...
...Pollitt was right: the criticism of Hillary Clinton was in part a thinly veiled assault on the liberal agenda that the Clinton administration seemed to augur...
...The closest Cook came to specifying Clinton's activism in behalf of health care was to express her own uncertainty about the First Lady's continued interest in her designated cause...
...The feminist response to the First Lady reveals two missed political opportunities...
...Any spouse as politically attuned as Hillary Clinton is going to have something to say about public policy...
...SUMMER • 1997 • 93 Arguments Figuring out how to combine personal and professional independence with family and marital commitments is certainly a prime issue for the Clintons' generation...
...That susceptibility created difficulties for Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, as Doris Kearns Goodwin suggested in the sisterly preinaugural letter she addressed to Hillary Clinton in the January/February 1993 issue of Mother Jones...
...The sympathy I can understand...
...Then Pollitt suddenly moved from staunch defense to wistful admission...
...Organized feminism," she wrote, is caught in a co-dependent relationship with electoral politics: No matter how often and how blaSUMMER • 1997...
...Indeed, the prospect of "public partnership marriages" was happily entertained by Ellen Goodman, who applauded Mrs...
...In a March 1993 double salute to Mrs...
...Clinton and the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day, Anna Quindlen wrote in the New York Times: "Maybe some of our daughters took notice of how Hillary Clinton was seen as abrasive, power-hungry and unfeminine when to some of us she seemed merely smart, outspoken and hardworking...
...In Goodman's view, Mrs...
...The major exception was Ellen Goodman...
...But it's one thing to protest a vicious attack and another to venerate its target...
...Clinton's problem "was not being too much of a feminist, but too little of one...
...But if we continue to judge presidential candidates as embodiments of familial virtue rather than as public figures, holding presidential husbands and wives to a single standard could promote rather than preclude future First Partnerships...
...Pollitt herself seemed ambivalent...
...Unfortunately, the task of pursuing an ambitious agenda is complicated by the weakness of the women's movement and the rest of the left...
...If we want people to listen to—and act on—what feminists have to say, we need a better conversation than the one we've just had about Hillary Clinton...
...To put the muscle back into American feminism will require a bracing exchange about why we're in trouble...
...But where Scheer had grouped NOW and the California senators under the single rubric of callous pro-choice women, Pollitt distinguished "electoral" feminists from their "organized" sisters...
...This from a senator who never had to work a day in her life until she decided to get on the public payroll...
...For some reason— feminist solidarity?—Rosen ignored Pollitt and went after Cockburn...
...The foregoing examples convey the sympathy, indeed the enthusiasm, with which most feminist pundits greeted Hillary Clinton...
...In October 1993, after Mrs...
...I'm voting for him...
...In fact, only Safire deserved such condemnation...
...Clinton sought power through her husband's largesse rather than on her own merits...
...Beyond a forgiving attitude toward the First Lady, this mix of adulation and conspicuous silence reveals a rhetorical style that often comes to the fore when feminists encounter sympathetic political figures, institutions, or ideas that are under fire...
...Noting that the husbands of women who are running for office generally don't behave this way, Lehrman asked: What if Stewart Boxer, a lawyer specializing in workers' compensation cases, started playing an ostentatious role in Barbara's California Senate campaign...
...Goodwin noted that Eleanor Roosevelt's brief tenure as assistant director of the Office of Civil Defense "turned out to be a disaster" because, "after all, she was married to the president...
...She noted that plenty of First Ladies and other presidential relatives had pulled strings behind the scenes...
...Having cheered Mrs...
...Ehrenreich followed up that blast by advising Clinton to stiffen her spine and ignore her critics...
...She has been joined by Barbara Ehrenreich, who, in the November issue of ZMagazine and more recently in the New York Times, deplored the "sycophancy" that Gloria Steinem and other leading feminists and progressives displayed toward the White House...
...But in a democracy, robust exchange is indispensable to political strength and agility...
...Instead, with few exceptions, feminists circled the wagons, ignoring some troubling questions (such as those raised by Lehrman and Goodwin) and openly dismissing others...
...the growing political power of women...
...Clinton's politics...
...As Kaus noted, he was echoing Karen Lehrman's charge that Mrs...
...For the moment, especially at election time, doing the right, that is, politically astute, thing means choosing the lesser evil...
...But since Hillary Clinton's quandary arises from her marriage to an elected official, it just doesn't bear comparison to the predicaments of most of her contemporaries...
...A discerning feminist punditry would distinguish brutal assault from reasoned critique by giving Mrs...
...But taking counsel is different from giving a spouse an official portfolio...
...I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the health plan she and her advisers came up with...
...Fair enough...
...For Pollitt, the betrayal went beyond the Senate vote on so-called welfare reform to congressional women's overall priorities: "playing toward the center, amassing campaign funds, keeping business and big donors happy, and currying favor with the leadership in the hope of receiving plums...
...First, the furor over her wifely accession offered a chance to start disentangling presidential marriage from electoral politics...
...Flying to Mrs...
...But in their eagerness to champion Mrs...
...Low programmatic expectations also help explain feminists' lack of interest in Hillary Clinton's tenure as health care czarina: feminists haven't made health care, aside from reproductive rights and breast cancer, a high priority...
...Despite its laudable provisions for universal coverage, the Clinton plan, she concluded, aimed more at "getting the bills paid" than at improving Americans' health...
...Where Roosevelt crusaded for housing, "Mrs...
...Clinton's feminist credentials had vanished...
...What made it so hard for feminists to criticize the First Lady...
...But as indicated by feminists' generally unsatisfying response to Hillary Clinton, our problems go beyond a skimpy program...
...The advantage of the latter gesture would be to make the private, advisory role public and formal...
...By then, the First Lady had become the head of the White House task force, Ted Koppel had devoted two installments of Nightline to the ominous implications of her open accession to public policy making, and rumors about the Clintons' private lives were circulating with abandon in the media...
...For all their declared interest in the First Lady, most feminist commentators didn't pay much attention, critical or otherwise, to her prime political role—chairing the president's health care task force...
...Outraged, Scheer exploded: Dependency...
...Jong echoed these accolades and added her own: "H.R.C...
...The tag cast Mrs...
...NOW, she protested, had taken a principled stand during the congressional battle over welfare, only to find its efforts "totally ignored by the media...
...Instead, feminist objections were sparse and mostly muted...
...Clinton her due as a political figure and then dealing with her record...
...In a 1993 essay in the Nation in which she assailed the First Lady's critics in the media, Pollitt noted in passing that as a single-payer supporter, she was no fan of Mrs...
...The dangers of such deference became grossly apparent at the end of Bill Clinton's first term in the White House...
...Blanche Wiesen Cook repeated the compliment in a January 1996 op-ed piece for the New York Times...
...Clinton's defense, Rosen lumped Cockburn together with William Safire as fellow agents of a "splenetic sexism" who had variously attempted "the character assassination" of the First Lady...
...Writing in the Nation, she maintained that the real problem wasn't an overweening First Lady but rather her misogynist detractors...
...Scandalized by the "deafening silence" of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the rest of the women's movement, including its advocates in the press, regarding the then-current proceedings on welfare legislation, Scheer wondered whether pro-choice women had much more regard for real children than did their hypocritical pro-life opponents...
...What Lehrman called her "ostentatious role" also needs to be understood in terms of the sexual double standard that operates in our presidential politics.* Husbands of women candidates stay out of the limelight because nobody expects...
...No kidding...
...Feminists' difficulty in separating Hillary Clinton's feminist persona from her politics was part of their larger disinclination to upbraid women politicians and organizations deemed liberal, that is, at the very least, pro-choice...
...As the 1996 race revealed, the wives of presidential candidates are also subject to a partisan double standard: nobody criticized Elizabeth Dole's ostentatious intervention in her husband's campaign...
...Blanche Wiesen Cook contended that what "really made people angry" about the current First Lady was exactly what had galled the critics of Eleanor Roosevelt: "her political activism" per se...
...Pollitt, for her part, displayed an equally heedless disdain when she wrote off the First Lady's detractors in the media as jealous women and sexist men suffering from "status anxiety" and job insecurity...
...Goodman then backed off by adding, "Where do you go after you've walked into a propeller...
...the enthusiasm seems odd...
...To be sure, it will take more than talk to get the women's movement to the point where it can seize its opportunities...
...It was good, in September 1993, to see the First Lady's dalliance with the politics of meaning coolly appraised by Wendy Kaminer in Mirabella and, in winter 1996, to find Mrs...
...I'm glad she's a survivor...
...None of them, for example, engaged Karen Lehrman's argument, published in the New York Times in July 1992, that Mrs...
...They also have to do with a tendency to idealize, even idolize, smart, attractive women who are in high office...
...On the contrary, misogynist rants aside, the beleaguered First Lady was simply struggling with the general confusion about how twocareer couples can consolidate their professional and marital lives...
...Katha Pollitt gave the subject even shorter shrift...
...Finessing the issue with greater smoothness, Ruth Rosen allowed only that "[Mrs...
...and] the mainstreaming of a popular you-can-do-it feminism...
...Pollitt and other feminist writers (Ellen Goodman struck this theme again and again) rightly denounced the hateful and often obscene campaign against the First Lady...
...One of the few other feminists to probe Clinton's reforming efforts was Maryann Napoli...
...We don't have a monarchy, where the whole family gets to run the country...
...In another intriguing parallel with Rosen, Pollitt overlooked Clinton's feminist, female critic and cited only the offending male pundit...
...To begin, taking on either of these issues would have meant reproving a First Lady already under attack from critics who wanted only to destroy her...
...is the latest incarnation of Miss Liberty...
...If the piling on of Hillary Clinton's enemies muffled feminists' reservations about her politics, feminist discourse was diminished and the First Lady yet further demeaned by such forbearance...
...The Clintons, she wrote in September 1994, "can blame [the loss of health care reform] on gridlock, on Republicans, on the media...
...Clinton as a victim, when, as Goodman had just indicated, the "propeller" the First Lady walked into had been partly of her own making...
...In July 1994, when the Senate was balkSUMMER • 1997 • 91 Arguments ing at universal coverage, Goodman suggested that the Senators replace the ample, publicly funded benefits bestowed on members of Congress and their families with the spotty provisions they were advocating for their constituents...
...Clinton's testimony on health care had momentarily dazzled Congress, and again, in September 1994, after the demise of the Clintons' health care reform campaign, Ellen Goodman admiringly compared her to Eleanor Roosevelt...
...She's dependent all right, on rich parents and husbands who have bankrolled her career...
...Hillary Clinton met the double standard halfway: she played the supportive wife, which was fine, and at the same time the political partner, which was not...
...Indeed, a glance at Garry Wills's inventory of "Hillaryhating," which appeared in the New York Review of Books in November 1996, is almost enough to banish any thought of ever criticizing Mrs...
...Clinton's untoward political ambitions, manifest in her unseemly participation in her spouse's presidential campaign...
...In other words, Pollitt observed, these congresswomen were acting just like their venal male counterparts...
...That impulse should be checked, as should yet another that figured in the First Lady's reception: the urge to dismiss opinions that challenge the prevailing feminist wisdom...
...Last summer, several prominent feminists— Martha Burk and Heidi Hartmann in the Nation and Betty Friedan in the New Yorker—urged the women's movement to broaden its agenda and embrace the issues that American women say they care about most: work and pay, violence, and health care...
...Wouldn't we resent him if he consistently filled in for her at campaign stops, gave substantial speeches and offered off-the-cuff comments...
...She criticized Mrs...
...I admire [her] intelligence and her selfassurance," Napoli said, "and I was impressed with the way she went around the country asking people to share their experiences and soliciting their advice...
...A few weeks later, in the Los Angeles Times, Ruth Rosen placed Mrs...
...Other feminist writers treated Hillary Clinton's foray into health care reform with greater dispatch...
...In other pieces, she defended the propriety of a policy making First Lady...
...Take, for example, Ruth Rosen's dressingdown of Alexander Cockburn after he had severely panned Rodham Clinton's book in the Nation...
...It's not too late to make that threat, and one way to show we're serious is to expand the feminist agenda...
...Enough already, said Pollitt...
...Feminists might have lobbied the president's mate in support of a single-payer model of health insurance and then reprimanded her, first, for having rejected that option out of hand and next, for having botched the subsequent political process...
...Goodwin urged Hillary Clinton to follow Eleanor Roosevelt's best example and to operate with vigor from the "first lady-ship" outside the administration, a proposal that no more interested Clinton than it did most feminist pundits...
...I'm not voting for her," a friend told Pollitt...
...How did their reticence bear more broadly on feminist politics...
...Scheer singled out Feinstein's behavior as particularly offensive...
...But Hillary Clinton's behavior shouldn't be attributed solely to self-aggrandizement...
...In a January 1995 essay in Time focusing on the First Lady's characterological contradictions, Barbara Ehrenreich, another vocal single-payer advocate, devoted a single, albeit deliciously caustic, sentence to Mrs...
...But it was also bungled...
...Lehrman went on to wonder why we should countenance a role for potential First Ladies that we'd find unacceptable for potential First Gentlemen...
...Begging the hard questions, this style squelches dialogue and narrows vision...
...The issue here isn't achieving sexual parity or well-integrated two-career marriages, but ensuring accountability...
...As Lehrman urged, the double standard for political spouses should be laid to rest...
...But the problem of accountability would remain, given how easily political authority is confounded by marital ties...
...Interestingly, Cockburn's appraisal was scarcely less charitable than Katha Pollitt's scathing evaluation of the book, which had appeared a week earlier in the Nation un94 • DISSENT Arguments der the headline "Village Idiot...
...Pollitt also argued that "the sexist attack on Hillary Clinton is partly a lazy way to attack her husband" and above all an effort to avert the gender-inflected changes that, to many, the First Couple's partnership portended— for example, "the social shift to more egalitarian marriages...
...Maybe," she wrote, "it's time we learned to live openly with reality...
...Next, the Clintons' campaign for health care reform opened space for an agenda that would have benefited American women in major ways...
...95 Arguments tantly our hopes are betrayed, we keep coming back, begging to have our illusions rewoven for another bout at the polls...
...The next month Goodman explained why any serious reform package had to include abortion...
...Too often a politician, especially a woman, has had only to declare a pro-choice stand in order to win feminist endorsements...
...But the sweeping gesture also led her to discount at least one tenable objection to the First Lady, the accusation of "false feminism" brought by Mickey Kaus in the February 15, 1993 issue of the New Republic...
...Clinton's cause," Cook wrote, "is, or was, health care...
...Erica Jong remarked that the First Lady "claimed center stage with top policy issues—however politically naive she may have been," leaving the issues and the naiveté unspecified...
...Clinton and the feminist program she might have symbolized, most feminist observers disregarded criticism that arose from genuine feminist and democratic concerns...
...Clinton's book on child-rearing and public policy, It Takes a Village, trenchantly reviewed by two feminist readers: Katha Pollitt in the Nation and Jean Bethke Elshtain in the New Republic...
...Clinton's part in the health care reform debacle: "Motivated by the noblest intentions, no doubt, she nonetheless came up with what was, from almost any ideological perspective, the healthcare plan from hell...
...It behooves us to wonder why feminists by and large passed up both these opportunities...
...What they also should have given her and other politicians of her ilk was the following message: Don't count on us after Election Day—we're going to be out organizing so that next time around we can back a candidate in good faith...
...Six months later, Pollitt's doubts about Mrs...
...In an essay that appeared in Glamour in November 1992, Katha Pollitt reported that even before the election, Hillary Clinton's political role troubled some observers, including "many feminists" who resented her using her governorhusband's high office and his attempt to gain an even higher one to advance herself...
...Why not indeed...
...Clinton's problems had nothing to do with a betrayal of feminism...
...answer those questions, we need a better idea of what feminists said about Hillary Clinton...
...He reported that, according to her press secretary, Feinstein stood by her vote because she believed that "the welfare system has created a chronic dependency...
...Feminist pundits' cursory interest in the First Lady's campaign to reform health care was matched by their nonchalance about whether she should have taken the task force post in the first place...
...Like Rosen's conflation of Safire and Cockburn, the wholesale rebuke enabled Pollitt to assume a position of unimpeachable rectitude while identifying with a high-profile female victim of real abuse...
...96 • DISSENT...
...Why not," Pollitt went on to ask, "try something different...
...Also worrisome were the larger political implications of the Clintons' tandem style...
...Pollitt, increasingly disenchanted with the feminist political establishment, now chastises not only elected officials but also the feminist leaders who kowtowed to Clinton when he signed the welfare bill and then lined up behind him in the presidential campaign...
...them to do otherwise, while the public and the media demand that a politician's wife actively aid her husband's campaign—to be sure, by appearing as his amenable helpmate, not his political partner...
...After seconding other feminists' dismay about the then-would-be First Lady's makeover as a fifties housewife a la Harriet Nelson, Lehrman pointed out that "riding on [her husband's] coattails is just as much a betrayal of feminism, despite the fact that no prominent feminist has said as much...
...Not incidentally, a male observer sounded the alarm...
...That unfortunately is an option not available to most welfare mothers...
...And how might we do things differently next time...
...It thereby further enfeebles the already debilitated women's movement...
...If anything, we should welcome criticism...
...Her survival means I can survive...
...Clinton a "congenital liar," whereas Cockburn had merely offered a provocative assessment of the "socialworker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing," that, he contended, informed It Takes a Village...
...But Scheer had a bigger target: the feminists who had helped elect these officials, and who then, he claimed, stood by as they voted millions of women and children into beggary...
...In October 1995, Robert Scheer, writing in the Los Angeles Times, censured the senators from California, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, along with other pro-choice congresswomen who had supported the draconian welfare bill...
...Scheer's complaint may have jolted one feminist pundit into print...
...One might have thought, for example, that feminists—especially those who heralded the advent of a "First Partner" in the White House—would have taken the First Lady to task for her leading role in the disastrous campaign to overhaul health insurance, a fiasco so complete that it removed major health care reform from the national agenda...
...I would be surprised if Hillary didn't share a sense of failure...
...Feminists were understandably reluctant to fault a woman so besieged...
...In the March/April 1994 issue of Ms., Napoli wrote that her "hopes had soared" when she had learned that Mrs...
...It would have been even better if more feminists had similarly inquired into her positions on health care and "public partnership marriage," especially when those issues were current...
...And presidents should be encouraged to take able counsel wherever they can find it...
...With equal brevity but greater ideological circumspection, other feminist observers alluded approvingly to Rodham Clinton's politics without delving into their substance...
...Clinton would lead the task force...
...Clinton's willingness to be on the "frontline" of such ventures...
...So, for example, when Dianne Feinstein faced Michael Huffington in the 1994 race for the Senate, feminists properly swallowed their distaste for Feinstein's position on immigration and gave her their endorsement...
...But Pollitt ended up musing that by 92 • DISSENT Arguments seeking power through a powerful man, Hillary Clinton has perhaps "sold herself—and women—short...
...Clinton in "a distinguished reform tradition in our American past" that included Roosevelt and Jane Addams...
...Clinton on from the start, Goodman then had the mettle to admonish her at the end, though not without difficulty...
...For starters, we could demand more—much more—in return for our support...
...Clinton] has tried to promote the health care of all Americans...
...In the past year a few hopeful signs appeared...
...One of the First Lady's staunchest supporters and an eloquent advocate of universal coverage, Goodman repeatedly dedicated her syndicated column to Rodham Clinton and health care reform...
...In the end, Roosevelt had to resign from the office...
...Nodding to him in her December 4, 1995, column in the Nation, Katha Pollitt slammed "electoral feminism" in the name of the "justifiably fed-up women voters, including me," who, importuned by EMILY's List and other PACs, had poured "energy, time, enthusiasm and most important, money" into the congressional campaigns of women candidates, only to see their hopes betrayed when those women got to Washington...
Vol. 44 • July 1997 • No. 3
