by Miriam Horn
Whether there is something craven in a public figure’s image-making has been a vexing question at least since Shakespeare’s Coriolanus agonized over whether to parade his heroic war wounds before the Roman masses. The scars were real, but Coriolanus refused to pander, insisting that such a circus would express only contempt for the people, treating them as easily bedazzled children. His refusal proved disastrous. The dilemma is greater still in a culture so built on the machinery of publicity that it is merely foolish to imagine that simple, unadorned goodness will shine through without active manipulation of that machinery. “An eternity of false smiles … is the price you pay to lead,” Joe Klein wrote in a backhanded defense of the Bill Clinton character in Primary Colors: “You don’t think Abe Lincoln was a whore before he was a president?” He smiled his “backcountry grin … so he’d get the opportunity to appeal to the better angels of our nature.”
In the end, it seems that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s repeated refashionings of herself for public consumption have earned so much scorn not because she plays the image game but because for so long she played it badly. When she stitched together her image, the seams frequently showed—unlike the more adept Elizabeth Dole, who during the 1996 campaign was endlessly admired for “how well she hides her toughness and ambition” behind self-deprecation (her success is a mystery, as she tells it, something that merely happened to her), buttering up everyone she met with her honeyed drawl and the gracious manner of a southern belle. Lyndon Johnson called the former Duke University beauty queen a “sugarcoated steel magnolia.” In her autobiography, Dole recalled that during her years in the Reagan administration, she “seduced” her husband over a candlelight dinner into voting to sell planes to the Saudis. Though she has run an organization with a $1.8 billion budget and 32,000 employees, during the 1996 Republican convention Mrs. Dole stepped away from this “very imposing podium” to speak about “the man I love.” A decade older than Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole comes from a generation of women who had little choice but to slip through quietly, to feign “traditionalism” even if they were shaping the world. Phyllis Schlafly successfully led the Stop ERA campaign in 1972, all the while carrying gifts of homemade jam to state legislators. Hillary herself has increasingly adopted the manners of an old-fashioned wife, standing by her man even as he publicly confessed to yet another infidelity, this one with a woman half Hillary’s age. That demonstration of forbearance has had its own political benefits, winning Hillary—for the first time—the admiration of older, conservative women, who finally recognized a kindred spirit.
It is true that some styles are disastrous for women: The same caustic humor and brusque stiffness read as integrity in Bob Dole was despised when it surfaced in Hillary. But the constraints on women are probably no greater than they are for men: Bill Clinton is ridiculed for a moist style that when worn by Elizabeth Dole wins rapturous praise. What, then, is craven and what simply politically savvy? One is left, perhaps, to distinguish degrees of bad faith, to question whether the fabricated images are somehow faithful to the underlying truth and are in the service of some authentic purpose, or whether the initial conviction has evaporated and the quest to seduce and win (or simply survive) is all that remains.
Of course, the very idea of a “real self” revealed or concealed is dated. Postmodernists see a liberation of the self, not its betrayal, in the “masquerade.” Fashion, writes Anne Hollander, is “a costume trunk to express a woman’s complicated private character, a means of escape from fixed roles. A woman may keep wholly transforming through clothing with no loss of personal identity or consistency.” To be many things to many different people may be an expression of fluidity and wide-ranging empathy. Or it may be Machiavellian. Or it may be both.
“My hair has always been influenced by my life,” Chris Osborne wrote to her classmates in 1984, offering a chronology of hairstyles as the sum total of her entry in that year’s reunion book. “Short and lavender in ’65, it was by ’69 an inoffensive light brown … left scraggly in protest. By ’72, it was long enough for people to sit on. Cut and permed it in ’74, a huge mistake. I was fat then too.… By ’76, I was making big money in advertising so I used to take it down to New York and have Mr. Bobby at the Carlyle streak it. Much gray during my stint as a writer, then Associate Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson in San Francisco. I tried fighting back with wider streaks, but glare began causing mishaps on the Bay Bridge. At Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York … instantly more gray. I joined the Clairol group in 1982. While selling Nice ’n’ Easy Medium Golden Brown, I became one. This is the true me. Back in San Francisco as a senior writer at Foote Cone and Belding.… I breathe clean air, support causes and date many men who don’t suspect about my hair.”
Chris’s shape-shifting paralleled her “careening” path out of Wellesley in 1969. Fatherless and “plumb out of money” she had to get a job, though, like most of her classmates at graduation, anticipating a domestic destiny, Chris had spent little energy contemplating what she wanted to do. “Most of us were pretty lost about our choices; it’s a mistake to assume, for all the achievers, that we were a bunch of directed student council types like Hillary.” Chris took a secretarial job at Harvard but was soon bored, so she became a live-in housekeeper and cook for five male students at the business school. “I was supposed to be like a little sister. Oh, all right, I did sleep with one of them; I kind of shared him with one of my Wellesley classmates. It’s perfectly okay to tell the truth. My father was dead and I could do anything I wanted.”
Another year, and Chris was “running off” to California. “I worked temp jobs in Berkeley and lived with twenty-two people in a house at the edge of the campus. Everyone was fucking like bunnies, which wasn’t the number-one appeal of living that way but was a great way to get to know your friends. It was not uncomplicated; somebody was always pissed at somebody else for sleeping with her boyfriend. I got really tired of it, though I’ve always been a little saver and saved lots of money by sharing living and food. But I finally just wanted to get a job and live well. A lot of them had grown up in rich families; everyone was content with antimaterialism except me.”
Back in Boston, she found a job by going through the phone book. “I got to the letter M. Marvin and Leonard needed a typist. I spent four years learning to write retail furniture ads, which is about four years more than you need. Then Marvin and Leonard laid me off. I went downstairs to Hill Holiday, who gave me a raise to $5,000 a year. I was still the archetypal sixties girl. I had hair to my ass and tie-dyed this and macraméd that. But then I started to dress differently, putting on suits and heels like the character in Working Girl.”
Chris is now a chic platinum blonde, much younger looking and more fashionable than most of her classmates. And her twentieth reunion prediction—“It’s definitely beginning to look like I’ll get a neck lift before I have children”—has come true. “Advertising is full of twenty- and thirty-year-olds and I didn’t want to be obviously older than my peers. The neck lift was great. I got the whole lower face thrown in as a bonus. I don’t even have those little lines between my nose and upper lip. They pull up everything behind the ears.” She celebrated her new face, and a home renovation completed at the same time, at a “neck and deck” party for all her friends.
Playing earth mother or parochial school girl is one thing. Playing vixen is potentially a more treacherous game. A woman leaning on her sexuality risks not being taken seriously, becoming a target for parody: When Hillary Clinton attended the Miss America Pageant, The New York Times mocked Miss Delaware’s talking about changing American demographics “from atop spike heels.” And if to get what she wants a woman must be able to stir male desire, her power is highly perishable and, in fact, not her own. “Left-handed, sidelong in the right-handed upright world of men,” wrote poet Randall Jarrell, “they try to get around by hook or by crook, by a last weak winning sexual smile, the laws men have made for them.”
Though some young “
postfeminists” claim to be breaking new ground by enjoying and exploiting their sexuality in their public dealings with men, in fact numerous women—from Lola Montez to Clare Booth Luce to Pamela Harriman—have used sexual allure to rise above their origins; those who lived before this century have even been made heroines by recent feminist biographers. A Fortune magazine article in 1996 profiled seven successful businesswomen, noting that they all knew how to “skillfully exploit” their sexuality; among them was Ogilvy and Mather executive Charlotte Beers, Wellesley, ’57. Madeleine Albright, Wellesley ’59, is also a recognized master at flattering powerful men.
Michelle Lamson, ’69, has always used her exceptional beauty without qualms. A cheerleader and runner-up for homecoming queen as a girl in Des Moines, she was “spoiled silly by my daddy,” who sold road-building equipment and ran a giant mobile-home park and made lots of money and bought her show horses and ballet classes and Afghan hounds. Modeling couture in Paris after graduation, appearing on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily and in French Vogue while also attending the Institut des Sciences Politiques, Michelle knew that some thought her a bimbo. “I just made use of that perception. I think it’s fun if I’m having trouble changing a tire to play the weak silly woman to get some man to do it for me. I was never one to grow the hair under my arms because I was becoming an object. Should I quit wearing perfume? Perfume is one of life’s wonders. Should I make myself ugly to prove that I’m smart? The fact is, I dominate men all the time. Women are harder to seduce. But with men you can be so obvious and they never see through it.”
Married, but then left by her husband for another woman soon after her modeling career came to an end, Michelle worked as a freelance translator but grew lonely and became manager of a hunt shop in Paris, selling jodhpurs, bridles, and guns. “When some guy storms into the shop demanding to see the manager and is met by a tall, green-eyed blonde looking down on him, he’ll generally drool and stammer and forget his complaint. I don’t flirt. Never in my professional life have I felt they misinterpreted my actions. I simply use whatever weapons I have at my disposal to carve out a life for myself and my son.”
As yet, the prospect of losing her power to mesmerize men as she ages has not worried Michelle too much. “I don’t have the skin anymore. I don’t have quite the body I had. I’m not going to put a glass bell over myself to protect myself from getting older, or worry if I have a chipped nail. But I still get attention on the street, and like it. I always return it with a smile. Though now when the boys whistle, I say, ‘Thanks, I could be your mom,’ and they say, ‘I wish you were.’ ”
That the competition for men’s approval has historically divided women also does not concern Michelle. “It’s not my problem that I’m prettier than Mrs. A but that Mrs. B is prettier than me. There’s always somebody uglier and prettier. And I’m not using my beauty to be an object for men’s consumption—I’m using it to get my own way. I was the opposite of what we were all supposed to be at that time. I guess I still am.”
CHAPTER SIX
Balancing Work and Family
When it was first published in 1899, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening was branded a threat to woman’s virtue and the nation’s good. “Too strong drink for moral babes,” one critic wrote, “should be labeled poison.” Now revered as an early classic of feminist literature, the novel tells the story of a married woman with two young sons who finds her creativity awakened outside of her marriage and struggles between her responsibility to others and her imperative to be true to herself. “Think of the children,” the heroine is told by the “good mother” of the novel. And Edna Pontellier does think of the children, understanding that “wanting my own way is wanting a great deal when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others.” In the end, she decides that her “husband and children could not possess her body and soul,” and steps out of the shelter of her husband’s home and into the wider world, a rebellion against convention clearly admired by the author. Finally, being a creature of a less-tolerant century, Edna walks into the sea.
Whether a woman can fulfill herself within the family; whether she ought even to seek her own fulfillment; what it might mean to “think of the children”—a century after The Awakening, these questions remain unresolved. They are not, strictly speaking, only women’s questions: The tension between freedom and responsibility is the central American story. But for a woman, that tension has been felt most often at home, because it is within the family that she has been expected to work out her destiny.
The analysis of the family has therefore been from the beginning a core preoccupation of feminism. Even while drafting the Declaration on the Rights of Woman demanding suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton avowed that “the whole question of women’s rights turns on the marriage relation.” The remaking of family life was necessary not only to secure women equality at home, but also as an essential precedent and template for the remaking of power relations between men and women in the world. “The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”
While feminists undertook to reinvent the family, their alarmed detractors saw them out to destroy it. Their warnings grew particularly vehement when Hillary Clinton first stepped onto the national stage. Christian leader Pat Robertson preached that “feminism encourages women to leave their husbands and kill their children” (and also to “practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”). Others of slightly more temperate mind cast Hillary and the women she stood for as man-haters who “throw away marriages like paper towels,” sanction illegitimacy, devalue the role of fathers, and disparage cookie-baking moms. Critics found in the recent abundance of memoirs and novels and self-help treatises propaganda against the family as a site of violence and incest and little more. They saw these women suckering their young, impressionable sisters into turning their backs on the joys of hearth and home in favor of the ultimately barren satisfactions of career. In her 1994 memoir of infertility, Motherhood Deferred, Anne Taylor Fleming cursed “the old haranguing chorus … aping the cultural dismissal of women, femaleness, motherhood, our mothers … Hey Hey. Gloria! Germaine! Kate! Tell us, how does it feel to have ended up without babies?… I want to crawl back into my female sex … where oh where do I go to trade a byline for a baby?”
In fact, far from scorning maternity, first- and second-wave feminists more often rhapsodized what Marguerite Duras called “the colossal swallowing up … the only opportunity offered a human being to experience a bursting of the ego.” By virtue of her capacity to bear children, many claimed, a woman had a depth of heart and moral authority superior to man’s, better equipping her to manage economic and political power. Because she knows “the months of weariness and pain while bones were shaped within, [the] hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be,” as Olive Schreiner wrote, a woman could not look upon slain soldiers except as “so many mothers’ sons.” Were she to govern alongside man, she would bring an end to war: “she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not.” Marxist feminists argued that the “unpaid labors of reproduction” should be rewarded; antiwar marchers in the sixties flew banners announcing “ANOTHER MOTHER FOR PEACE.” Feminists led the fight for prenatal care, nutrition, and health-care programs for mothers and children, protection against discrimination against pregnant women and mothers, child care in the workplace, and parental leave.
Some feminists did renounce family outright, pessimistic that it could be transformed enough to permit women the same autonomy and creativity granted within it to men. Susan B. Anthony, who never married, believed that “a woman who will not be ruled must live without marriage.” Long before the class of ’69 arrived at Wellesley, the college’s more radical faculty had been advancing the view that like a nun taking vows, a woman bent on an intellectual career must remain unwed. “How many women of rare capacity ha
ve blotted themselves out,” asked Professor Vida Scudder, who had trained at Oxford with John Ruskin, “from a mistaken sense of duty?”
While some turned against marriage and motherhood because they promised to swallow a woman whole, others focused their critique on the ideology: They fought against the narrowing of women’s dreams, the confining idea that maternity was the only way for them to be happy and real. For some women, it surely was. For others, the “recipe for happiness” contained some other mixture. The women of ’69 knew well that not all women love motherhood: Raised by women with no other acceptable destiny, many had seen firsthand how chilly and miserable an unmotherly mother could be.
Yet even in its most antimaternal moments (“stop rocking the cradle and start rocking the boat”), the whole feminist chorus was still only the faintest chime against the massed voices of parents and experts and fairy tales and Wellesley College exhorting girls to seek safety and satisfaction with a successful husband and babies. Certainly, for all that the feminist harangue caught them full in their young faces, the class of ’69 still pursued marital bliss in the same proportions that women had for a century. Eighty-eight percent have married (a proportion typical for college-educated women in their age group, though lower then the 93 percent of Americans in their overall age group). One in three who married also divorced, but most of those have remarried. Three quarters of the graduates have children. Half of the ones who don’t, wish they did. The vast majority of those who have children have also tried to combine motherhood with paid work, in all manner of arrangements.