Since Quayle hadn’t watched the show, how did he even know enough about Murphy Brown’s domestic choices to criticize them? It turned out his speechwriter, Lisa Schiffren, was to blame. Even though a powerful man had said the words, she had written them and rendered Murphy “a weapon in the right’s attack on single motherhood.” She had read about the show and mentioned its willful celebration of single motherhood to her boss. He had liked the idea of critiquing Brown in his speech. After Schiffren left her post as Quayle’s speechwriter, Candice Bergen wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times criticizing Schiffren for being a self-proclaimed “full-time mother of two and an occasional writer. Not every woman has the luxury to make that choice,” Bergen jabbed. Murphy’s single motherhood might have been morally heroic and worth defending, but since a woman had spearheaded the national backlash, Schiffren’s choices were fair game to skewer, too. This was characteristic of the tenor of the debate between mothers who worked in offices and mothers who worked at home in the 90s—both roles were seen as unyielding, permanent identities. This lingers today. Each seems to criticize the other’s choices in order to reinforce their own.
Plenty of Murphy Brown fans laughed at Quayle’s tone deafness. The show’s writers and producers used the sitcom to respond to the vice president directly. In one episode, a disheveled Murphy watches the vice president lambaste her on television while home with her newborn. She later addresses Quayle from her anchor desk. “Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to . . . recognize that, whether by choice or by circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes. And ultimately what really defines a family is commitment, caring, and love.”
Quayle tried to walk back his words, emphasizing that he never meant to criticize single mothers and that his sister and grandmother were single mothers, too, because they were divorced. The real vice president even sent a stuffed elephant to Murphy’s fictional son. The show’s crew said it would donate the toy to a homeless shelter. Quayle’s press secretary later acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that his boss was battling a fictional character, and how that might seem nuts. The flap became too politically hot for Quayle to handle. He eventually dropped “family values” from his stump speeches.
Murphy Brown had a unique dais from which to comment on politics. It riffed on the Anita Hill hearings in the wake of that controversy, for instance. Doing so made the show a must-see for the Beltway elite, who emptied the capital Monday nights “to head home and watch and see if they were name-checked,” English told me. Her Los Angeles office features framed front pages of newspapers covering the Murphy Brown–Dan Quayle spar. What was truly significant, according to English, was how the debate around Murphy’s baby impacted that year’s presidential election, which would end twelve years of Republican control of the executive branch. This was what English had hoped to do all along.
“My goal from the beginning was to erase the line between fiction and nonfiction,” she says. “When the vice president is talking about Murphy Brown as if she’s an actual person, that was the definition of success for me. The presidential election got turned a bit on that debate.” Antiestablishment candidate Bill Clinton began to look more like the future, while George Bush and Dan Quayle seemed increasingly fossilized in their hostility toward women, working mothers, and the nation’s cultural evolution.
By 2003, a two-year survey of more than three thousand women found that equal pay and childcare were still two top concerns for women that had gone unaddressed by the government and employers. Domestic violence was number one. It took the 90s ending for society to realize that “one Carly Fiorina doesn’t change the world,” as gender politics researcher Shere Hite, author of the book Sex & Business, told the New York Times in 2000. Hite was referring to the Hewlett-Packard CEO, who was among the first women to run a Fortune 100 company. One Marcia Clark and one Murphy Brown didn’t change the world either. Women were so beat down by work culture at the close of the decade that they were opting out of the workforce as they had kids, or starting their own companies to avoid it, because they “feel it’s better to put their energy into that than into fighting the old system and being derailed into the sidelines,” Hite said.
White or black, working or not, women with children quickly found that it was impossible to be a good mother in public in the 1990s. But while the gender struggles of women in the workforce were daunting, they paled next to those of the women who tried to breach the corridors of power in Washington, DC.
6
First Bitch
In the 90s, three women politicians created truly national profiles by reaching for power and insulting the patriarchy along the way. The nation cheered and lampooned them for their drive, their ideology, and their hair. They were infamous for being different, and famous for being first. Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Janet Reno served in different capacities in the Clinton administration, which defined American politics throughout the decade, and perhaps ever since. Reno was the nation’s first woman attorney general, and Albright the first woman secretary of state, while Hillary Clinton was the country’s First Bitch.
In 1991, the Anita Hill hearings revealed how absent from and victimized by political power women really were. The event inspired women to seek political office on both the local and national levels. That explains why 1992—when four women won US senate seats, raising their ranks from 2 percent of the chamber to 6 percent—became known as the “Year of the Woman.” The Hill hearings had galvanized women politically. Still, the sitting president rooted against them. “This is supposed to be the year of the women in the Senate,” President George H. W. Bush said at a presidential debate in the lead-up to the election. “Let’s see how they do. I hope a lot of them lose.”
Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer won seats in California, Patty Murray in Washington, and Carol Moseley Braun in Illinois. Ask anyone what the “Year of the Woman” means, and they probably have no idea. Even the women elected to the Senate that year weren’t thrilled by the branding. “Calling 1992 the ‘year of the woman’ makes it sound like the ‘year of the caribou’ or ‘year of the asparagus,’” said Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. “We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.”
While these senators blazed a path to power for women in Congress, they didn’t attract the kind of controversy and national fame that Clinton, Albright, and Reno did. This trio negotiated with foreign powers, shaped policy, and managed large staffs. Their powers, combined with their sheer visibility in the new realm of 24/7 news coverage, made them more threatening than the women senators. Clinton, Albright, and Reno were powerful not by membership in a legislative body, but in and of themselves. As such, their authority was endlessly questioned and feared. Media narratives and even these women’s colleagues perpetuated the notion that power in their hands was dangerous.
LADY MACBETH
As Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1992, he promised American voters their first chance at a woman president. What he meant was, the American people were in for a bonus brain, a presidential-quality civil servant in his wife, Hillary. Supporters called it “two for the price of one.”
During the election, the accusation that Bill Clinton had engaged in a twelve-year extramarital affair with singer Gennifer Flowers marked a new kind of White House bid: one tinged by tabloid prurience. This revelation was said to steer Bill Clinton’s campaign to “the brink of implosion,” but it also unleashed waves of criticism on his spouse. Nearly every shred of evidence pointed to an affair. What wife stays with a husband who cheats on her for more than a decade? This was Hillary Clinton’s introduction to the nation.
The couple plays offense during a joint 60 Minutes interview, which aired after the Super Bowl in January of 1992. They are seated on a couch with hands intertwined. The slithery Bill refuses to admit guilt or innocence. He pleads with the American people to consider their own private, imperfect marriages, while scolding the licentious press for clawing their way into his bedroom. By t
he end of it, you’re with him, believing 60 Minutes interviewer Steve Kroft is the rake. This notion is furthered when Hillary Clinton said later in an interview that Kroft asked questions kindly when the couple was in studio, but that cameras reshot the host asking in a tougher manner once they had left.
Kroft, coming up empty, makes a final play for dirt. “You’ve seemed to reach some sort of understanding and arrangement,” he says of their marriage, insinuating that political aspirations and backroom deals soldered their bond. In typical Clintonian aw-shucks, Bill says, “Wait a minute!” three times and then, “You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage.” Hillary Clinton follows, in a voice inflected with Southern twinges since vanished, “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” She was referring to the country music star whose hit song, “Stand by Your Man,” celebrated deferential women. Hillary extends her drawl on these words, further jabbing the tear-streaked woman done wrong in the country ballad. Pundits would later call it her condescending “black-cent” that she used to hoodwink Southern and black audiences into thinking she was more bumpkin than boss.
“I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together,” she says. “And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.” He rubs her hand vigorously, as if washing it with soap. It was the start of what some journalists called the “Lady Macbeth framing” of Hillary Clinton. She had been masterminding his campaign and speaking to the press as if she were the candidate herself. Now she was perhaps sweeping an affair beneath the carpet. Hillary was the maniacal puppeteer manipulating her husband so she could ascend the throne, like the Bard’s famous character. “I could tell she was being seen as a bitch,” said MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren, who was the face of the network’s 1992 election coverage, dubbed “Choose or Lose.” “But it didn’t bother me, because I thought she’d be seen as intelligent as she was bitchy.”
The Clintons were not in Arkansas anymore. The Tammy Wynette dig was broadcast nationally, piped into the homes of millions. Many viewers were dubious: Wasn’t Hillary Clinton doing exactly what she had supposedly rejected, standing (well, sitting) by her philandering man in a television studio, wearing a modest headband and turtleneck up to her chin? British press had pinned her “the meek, mild, wronged wife.” She was cast as an elitist for her achievements—Yale Law Journal editor, counsel for Nixon’s impeachment, corporate attorney. Clinton was standing by her man, and for her own selfish gain so she could become copresident without being elected. Writer Christopher Hitchens explained that Hillary “knowingly lied about her husband’s uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt.”
The charge that she was riding on his coattails would reemerge in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, when the Clinton marriage was called “the longest, slowest, most painful car crash in marital history,” and Hillary was blamed both for inciting the affair with her career and ambition and for not leaving her husband. With the Wynette comment, Hillary had spit on the honest, small-town values America held dear. She was mocking those with less education and opportunity, and “appearing to show contempt for women who work at home,” journalist William Safire wrote.
Conservative women leapt to criticize Hillary’s inflammatory remarks. Outgoing First Lady Barbara Bush, who perfected the “everybody’s grandmother” image, declared that she would gladly be introduced to crowds with “Stand by Your Man” blaring in the background. Tammy Wynette, the First Lady of country music herself, was “mad as hell” and demanded an apology. “I can assure you, in spite of your education, you will find me to be just as bright as yourself,” she told Clinton through a reporter.
Two months later on the campaign trail, Clinton stepped in it again. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life,” she told reporters asking about her law firm job. She went on to say that feminism granted women the choice of work, at the office, at home, or both. But that wasn’t the sound bite. Critics reproved Clinton for mocking housewives and stay-at-home mothers. Republicans cast her as a “wild-eyed feminist who equated marriage with slavery,” and a danger to American families. Her views smacked of elitism. She had attacked women who forgive men their grievances, then stay-at-home moms, all in a matter of weeks. These comments—which seemed to flaunt her education, achievements, and career success, and denigrate domestic women as lazy dependents—angered housewives and scared their husbands. Fear of her was commercialized with the release of Hillary Clinton nutcracker dolls, legs spread wide to crush walnuts—or cojones. (They are still for sale on Amazon.)
Suddenly, the topic Bill Clinton was asked about most on television and in interviews was not the economy or foreign policy, but his wife. She introduced him at rallies, but seemed unwilling to relinquish the podium. “Perhaps never in a presidential campaign has the candidate’s wife become such a strong symbol of the campaign’s strength and weakness,” journalist Ted Koppel said.
The promise of a “twofer” presidency wasn’t a partnership at all, but a nefarious trick to launch Hillary into the Oval. Detractors began to search Hillary’s appearance for signs of menace. You could “detect the calculation in the f-stop click of Hillary’s eyes,” Vanity Fair surmised. She took on a Stepford sheen: “Lips pulled back over her slightly jutting teeth, the public smile is practiced; the small frown establishes an air of superiority; her hair looks lifelessly doll-like.” Most long-serving politicians commit gaffes, and the gaffes are eventually forgiven; just ask Joe Biden. And yet, somehow, more than twenty-five years after the Wynette and cookie incidents, the deep hatred of Hillary Clinton suggests that she is still paying for her words.
“Too intense, explosive” Hillary needed to be contained to salvage her husband’s campaign. Advisers began with her wardrobe. The campaign had already dressed her in girlish headbands, like the one she wore in the 60 Minutes interview. Post cookie comment, her closet filled with softening pastels, like Marcia Clark’s two years later during the O. J. Simpson trial. This tactic was no match for the entrenched caricature of Hillary that had already formed in the minds of Americans. A New Yorker cartoon satirized how women reacted to Hillary’s clothes—a shopper trying on a jacket tells the sales clerk, “Nothing too Hillary.” The wardrobe makeover attempted and failed to whip a “loving wife and mother” out of the “ambitious yuppie from hell,” as ABC News put it.
Perhaps entering the kitchen she had scorned would soften her image? In July of 1992, she committed to “bumping spatulas” with First Lady Barbara Bush in a cookie bake-off for Family Circle magazine. The New York Times reported that Clinton was competitive, even with sweets, telling a group of congressional wives that “she was going to all-out win.” And indeed, her chocolate chip cookies, which she said contained healthy oatmeal and oil, beat Barbara Bush’s buttery shortbread in the era when margarine was queen.
“A WIFE WHO DOMINATES HER HUSBAND”
After Bill Clinton was elected, rumors swirled that Hillary would usurp undue power in the White House. She was the first First Lady to have a postgraduate degree and a career. It was reported that she would have her own West Wing office with more and higher-level staff than Vice President Al Gore. On the trail, reporters had asked if she wished to replace the senator from Tennessee as her husband’s vice presidential nominee. “I’m not interested in attending a lot of funerals around the world,” she joked. Then she grew serious. “I want maneuverability . . . I want to get deeply involved in solving problems.”
America grew unsettled as the media accused Hillary Clinton of overstepping her bounds, speculating that she would hold a cabinet position, choose cabinet members, or pass laws. Indeed, Bill was whom the country had elected, and one could argue that the Clintons asked f
or criticism by promoting themselves as a “two-for-one” deal. But sexism was present, too, if often disguised as traditionalism.
“It’s not that she’s an accomplished modern woman,” a Republican political consultant told the New York Times. “It’s just that she’s grating, abrasive and boastful. There’s a certain familiar order of things, and the notion of a coequal couple in the White House is a little offensive to men and women.” A 1992 Vanity Fair poll had found that 44 percent of respondents thought Hillary was “power-hungry,” 36 percent said she was “too intense,” and 28 percent agreed she was “a wife who dominates her husband.”
The press demanded that Bill Clinton make clear to the American people how he intended to deploy his wife. “Voters should know beforehand what sort of First Ladyship is in store. Would she work on the outside or the inside?” William Safire wrote. The questions gave voice to the insecurities of the voting populace. America “wants a First Lady to be an adjunct to the man that they elected, but they have no control over her, and that, I think, causes a great deal of fear,” said author Patricia O’Brien, speaking on ABC’s Nightline.
To blunt these fears, Clinton marched her pacification tour of baked goods into the White House. She served reporters cookies after a Christmas Eve news conference announcing cabinet appointees, including Zoë Baird and Joycelyn Elders. News outlets called her move “uncharacteristic,” but the Clintons surely knew that handing out the desserts that got her in trouble would grab attention. She continued her confection offensive to telegraph that she had been tamed and was no longer a threat. She couldn’t resist cake! She confided to the New York Times that “rich, rich, rich chocolate cake with thick chocolate icing” was her vice. “Chelsea and I love chocolate,” she said. As presidential historian Gil Troy put it, “She was, essentially, fired from her public role as Bill Clinton’s sentry—and backbone.”
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