Unlike her Republican predecessor Betty Ford, who had publicly differed with her husband on important public issues, and Nancy Reagan, who was widely reported to take a hand in her husband’s personnel decisions and scheduling, Barbara Bush kept her views to herself. She had briefly flirted with the dangers of sarcasm in the 1984 election when she had described the Democratic candidate for vice president Geraldine Ferraro as “a 4-million dollar … I can’t say it but it rhymes with rich.”125 Barbara Bush’s phoned apology to Ferraro failed to obliterate the remark from the public record, and her disclaimer that she had meant “witch,” rather than a stronger term commonly applied to forceful women, found few believers. Opponents took this outburst as evidence of a small nasty streak in an otherwise kindly genteel front.
The White House years showed no public repetitions of this lapse, and Barbara Bush stuck to noncontroversial topics related to her family and her hostessing duties whenever she gave an interview. Not since Bess Truman had the nation witnessed in a First Lady such a combination of self-confidence in herself and “hands off” national issues. Other presidents’ wives, including Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy, had not forayed into the political thicket but they had not been seen as holding strong opinions of their own on such topics. Barbara Bush was widely believed to differ with her husband on gun control laws and on a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but she skillfully skirted attempts to put those views on public record.
By the 1990s, such a traditional approach to the job of First Lady had many critics, and some of them surfaced during the debate over whether Barbara Bush was the appropriate commencement speaker at Wellesley College. The invitation had been offered by administration officials without consulting students, who, when they learned of it, got up a petition against her appearance that more than 150 students signed. They objected that she boasted no achievement of her own—her fame resulted entirely from her marriage to a man who later became president.
Rather than defend herself, the First Lady spoke up for the students, saying that she understood their point and respected other women’s rights to make decisions different from hers. Then, in an impressive public relations coup, she offered to bring along with her to Wellesley Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was scheduled to be in the United States at the time to sign an important agreement on nuclear arms and chemical weapons.
The Wellesley audience heard two women from quite different backgrounds on June 1, 1990: Raisa Gorbachev, university professor, and Barbara Bush, college dropout. The latter injected some wit in her remarks by noting that “somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse.” She paused, then added, “I wish him well.”126
When feminists expressed disappointment over Barbara Bush’s traditional approach to the job, she tried to deflect them by keeping quiet. The suspicion that she would have joined them, left to her own reputation to defend, helped soften the criticism. In fact, she was enormously popular with many segments of the public and often garnered an “approval rating” higher than that of her husband. Good Housekeeping readers put her at the top of their “Most Admired” list for four years in a row, and at the 1992 nominating convention, the Republicans scheduled her speech during prime time on national television. The convention had already broken one precedent by listing the vice president’s wife, attorney Marilyn Quayle, as a featured speaker, and she had angered many in the audience by referring to “women’s essential nature” to be mothers and homemakers.
Much of the 1992 campaign centered on the country’s economic status. Although a recession appeared ended, the Republican candidate failed to make that message clear or credible, and many voters who had supported him in 1988 cast their ballots for the Democrat or the insurgent Texas billionaire Ross Perot. Even before the returns came in, it was clear the president would lose. In fact, he garnered only 38 percent of the popular vote, less than any incumbent since William Howard Taft ran for a second term in 1912.
Barbara Bush did not seem entirely unhappy with the prospect of leaving the White House. She had often said she wanted to get out of politics while she was still vigorous enough to garden, and she appeared to relish the privacy and freedom that her husband’s exit from public life promised. She had neither redefined the job of First Lady nor been altered significantly by living in the White House. Gardening, reading, and being with her grandchildren were sufficient to occupy her time and hopes. “Life inside the White House was great,” she later wrote, “and believe it or not, it’s great outside, too.”127 Still enormously popular with the public, she and George continued to top Gallup polls asking which couples Americans admired most.
When Barbara Bush relinquished the White House in early 1993, she closed a chapter in First Lady history. She and the trio of women who preceded her achieved a transition—their tenures looking as much backward to their predecessors as forward to the new century. All four had been born within a few years of each other (1918–1927), and they had matured at a time when daughters were less likely to go to college than their brothers. Of the four, only Nancy Reagan earned a college degree. All had worked at some time in their lives, but only one had a career of her own and that was clearly a stopgap measure until she married. Actress Nancy Reagan had never concealed from Hollywood the fact that her real goal in life was to have a family. Hers was small—two children—but the other three produced more: Bush gave birth to six, Ford and Carter each had four.
All the women had played important partnership roles in their husbands’ political ascents, and in each case, the husband acknowledged his debt publicly. But much of the influence went undocumented and unquantified because it occurred off the record. Largely self-taught, the women learned quickly, and in the process they showed the potential in the job. But it remained for another generation of women to show what a well-educated, professionally qualified, forceful First Lady could do.
10
A New Generation in the White House (1993–2008)
ON JANUARY 20, 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton moved into the White House amid predictions that she would completely rewrite the job of First Lady. Headlines described a president’s “First Partner” who is “breaking new ground.”1 One magazine searched the record of three administrations to fashion a composite that did her justice, finally concluding that she was a “presidential super spouse” who combined “the policy presence of an Eleanor Roosevelt [with] the sounding board of a Milton Eisenhower and the … generalship on hard decisions that Robert F. Kennedy offered during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.”2 Within months, a popular magazine outlined not “The President’s First One Hundred Days” but “A Hundred Days of Hillary.”3 The normally sedate Atlantic suggested that she was making “motherhood look good” on women’s job resumés,4 and the career-minded Working Woman evaluated the “ripple effect of the ‘Billary’ phenomenon” on “husband-wife business relationships” across the nation.5 Television viewers of CNN’s popular “Sonya Live” cheerfully offered their own opinions of the First Lady’s effect on the president and on the nation.6
Much about the Clinton presidency looked new. Three decades earlier Americans had listened to John Kennedy speak passionately of power passing to a generation of leaders “born in this century,” but as the year 2000 approached, the nation’s top politicos talked more of the twenty-first century. Many had matured in a time when the United States had already claimed prominence among the nations of the world. Both President Clinton and Vice President Gore, together with their spouses and closest colleagues, had come of age when atomic bombs and nuclear warfare were household words; they had grown up with computers and jet planes. They expected to play major roles in policies affecting the 2000s.
The gap between George Bush’s generation and that of Bill Clinton was bigger than is usual between one administration and the next, and for their wives the distance loomed even larger. H
istorians focusing on American women’s lives may one day argue that the greatest watershed of all lay in those decades separating Barbara Bush’s birth in 1925 and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s in 1947. One year younger than Barbara’s oldest child, Hillary had grown up in a very different world.
Hillary had not only graduated from college but had completed law school and then gone on to work her entire adult life. Barbara Bush dropped out of college after one year and never held a full-time job. The older woman’s choices had been defined by her husband’s jobs and by the needs of her children; the younger had begun a career first and then fit family around it. The contrast is underlined in their approach to their names. Most Americans find difficulty coming up with the maiden name of Barbara (Pierce) Bush, whereas few have trouble remembering that Hillary was born a Rodham.
It was not just that the two women had taken such remarkably different paths—in education, work, and domestic arrangements—but that so many of their contemporaries had made the same choices they had. Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton were quintessential examples of women of their time and class. As the older woman, Bush may have had some friends whose careers resembled Clinton’s but such a path would have been as much an anomaly as a Barbara-Bush-type among Hillary’s contemporaries.
By the time the Clintons moved into the White House, young Americans showed the effect of changes in the 1970s and 1980s. In education, girls had evened out the odds, and by 1991, white females who graduated from high school were more likely to go on to college than were males.7 Old quotas that had held down the numbers of women admitted to professional and graduate schools faded or disappeared, and by 1990, women collected a sizeable fraction of degrees granted: 34 percent of those in medicine; 31 percent in dentistry; 42 percent in law; 25 percent in theology; and more than half of the doctorates awarded in education, foreign languages, health sciences, literature, psychology, and public affairs.8
At work, the change was reflected in the numbers of women holding full-time jobs. When Barbara Bush’s oldest child entered elementary school in 1952, it was the unusual mother in a two-parent household who went outside her home to work, especially when her children were very young. By the time Chelsea Clinton entered grade school, more than half of the nation’s mothers with children her age held a job.9
Young children developed strategies for managing on their own, leading to discussions of “latchkey” children, and they learned it was not necessarily their mother who should be summoned in case of emergency. Chelsea Clinton was simply doing what she had been taught when, soon after her father became president, she took sick at school and requested that he be called “because my mother’s busy.” Bill Clinton explained to amused reporters that he had generally been the more reachable parent, as governor of Arkansas, while his wife’s law practice kept her away from the phone for hours at a time.
A new generation of Americans grew accustomed to seeing women in places of power and influence: their actions covered on the front pages of important newspapers and their pictures in television programs of substance. First Ladies before 1993 had come of age when women in politics were rare and those who ventured to run for office found themselves denigrated as “hard,” “unfeeling,” and “unfeminine.” Barbara Bush grew up in a Republican household where she later admitted the name of Eleanor Roosevelt was associated with models to avoid rather than emulate. Hillary Rodham Clinton also had conservative, Republican parents, who held no great admiration for the activist Democratic First Lady but they did not allow those negative feelings to diminish their aspirations for their daughter. Her mother really hoped, she later admitted, that Hillary would be the first woman on the Supreme Court.10
Dorothy Rodham believed that barriers against women in high government jobs would lift in her daughter’s generation and she was right. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Three years later the Democratic Party achieved a “first” of its own when it named Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run with Walter Mondale of Minnesota for the top two political jobs in the land. Female members of the president’s cabinet ceased being a novelty, and the number of women legislators climbed slowly but steadily. By the time the 103rd Congress took seats in 1993, women claimed six places in the Senate and forty-eight in the House of Representatives. On the state level, they did even better, winning nearly twenty percent of the total posts.
Some women holding high political office admitted they had entered the field because they had tired of feeling shortchanged by their government. Across the nation, a “gender gap” in political consciousness that had been predicted even before women were permitted to vote finally showed itself. Women demanded help from their legislators on a long list of problems that seemingly shaped their lives and altered their happiness more than men’s, such as health care (including the right to terminate a pregnancy), family leave, environmental concerns, and gun control. Not a few were shocked into political action by what they perceived as government’s unfair treatment of other women, including Anita Hill when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the conduct of a potential appointment to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas.
Mothers who had formerly been dismissed by their representatives as unimportant ladies in “tennis shoes” suddenly showed confidence to take on government—and become part of it. Patty Murray, running for U.S. Senator from Washington in 1992, flaunted as her campaign slogan a phrase that had upset her a few years earlier when she had been dismissed by a legislator as too insignificant for his attention. Now Murray asked people to “vote for a Mom in tennis shoes.” Such pairing of maternal status and legislative competence would have been ludicrous a generation earlier when women seeking political office or high corporate jobs played down their family status. Male candidates had traditionally paraded out their entire households—wife, children, even parents and pets—but women, for whom these same attachments carried fewer positive appeals, tended to hide their family links. Pat Schroeder, congresswoman from Colorado, in an exception to the rule, had greeted fellow legislators with the wry announcement that she possessed a “uterus and a brain and they both work.”
The gains women made might have been expected to change perceptions of candidates’ wives and make an activist, career-minded Hillary Rodham Clinton look particularly appealing. Voters accustomed to seeing women in high office might predictably rate a male candidate higher if an accomplished spouse ran alongside, especially if he admitted he intended to seek her advice and value her counsel. Long used to the idea that a candidate’s wife became part of his record and that her success as wife and mother entered into any evaluation of his fitness for office, Americans now had the chance to extend their scrutiny to include a woman’s professional record. Much about the Clintons encouraged speculation.
Born on October 26, 1947, in a Chicago suburb, Park Ridge, Hillary Rodham Clinton had grown up in a comfortably middle-class home. Daughter of Hugh Rodham, who owned a small fabric store, and Dorothy Rodham, full-time wife and mother, she was the oldest of their three children (and the only girl), and played the classic role of the first-born who tries so hard to please. When her parents encouraged her to do everything that her brothers did, she took them seriously. “I was determined,” Dorothy Rodham later told the Washington Post, “that just because she was a girl didn’t mean she should be limited.”11
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Dorothy Rodham may have felt that her own generation of women had been shut out. Her education had not gone beyond high school, but as an adult, she enrolled in a community college to take courses for her own satisfaction, or as a neighbor explained “just for the thrill of it, just to do something with her mind.”12 Hillary’s desire for risk and adventure, along with her displeasure at being excluded because of her sex, may well have come from her mother. In junior high school, Hillary decided she wanted to become an astronaut, and NASA’s explanation that the job was closed to
women was “infuriating” she later told the Washington Post.13
Hillary’s father, with the kind of scrappy personality that often marks an immigrant background and a college education (at Penn State) made possible by an athletic scholarship, prodded his daughter to try harder. She recalled that he played down her early academic successes so as to nudge her into doing more. His good judgment earned her permanent respect, and after his death, in April 1993, she lamented that she could no longer turn to him in difficult days at the White House.14
On top of the parental grounding, Hillary ingested a strong dose of Methodist training that directed her toward many of her choices. As a youngster, she attended the Methodist church, whose founder John Wesley had taken as an important creed: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” In her case the religious training had been reinforced by other events at the time she came of age—in the 1960s—when talk of “what you can do for your country” and of the Peace Corps and community involvement drew many young people into public service. By the 1990s, when Americans came to know more of Hillary Rodham, such talk appeared dated, if not naïve and suspiciously self-serving, but two decades earlier, it had been common and often sprang from genuine conviction.
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