Poet, novelist, teacher and memoirist, Erica Jong exploded on to the literary scene in 1973 with her first novel (written in just six weeks), Fear of Flying. A partly autobiographical study of a frustrated young wife’s experiences during the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it changed public perceptions of female sexuality by suggesting that women could enjoy casual encounters (famously termed the ‘zipless fuck’) just as much as men. On publication, Henry Miller wrote that ‘this book will make literary history – because of it women are going to find their own voice and give us great sagas of sex, life, joy, and adventure.’
From this point onwards, Jong became a prominent cultural commentator, providing a voice that is political, entertaining, incisive and often very provocative. In the following article she considers the Clinton marriage as the couple face Bill’s second term in office. The piece compares Hillary Clinton to Eleanor Roosevelt and outlines the many impossible trials meted out to gifted women who become First Lady.
Here we are, two minutes after the last American presidential election in the twentieth century, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is still the most problematic First Lady in American history – admired abroad, hated at home, mistrusted by women journalists even though this Administration has actually done much good for women. Suspected of being a megalomaniac, embroiled in document losing, spy-hiring, the suicide of an aide conjectured to be her lover, and possible perjury; pilloried in the press and jeered at in political cartoons; distrusted even by her admirers – can’t Hillary do anything right? Why does she get no credit for all the positive things she has done?
The old campaign button that trumpeted ‘Elect Hillary’s Husband in ’92’ showed a picture of Hillary, not Bill. Indeed, it’s hard to remember it ’now. It’s even hard to remember how Hillary flouted the rules decreed for political wives: the obligatory Stepford Wife impersonation, the fake flirtatious flattery that makes wives seem feminine and nonthreatening; the willingness to pretend to be the power behind the throne; the diplomatic surrender to the role of First Lady.
The kaleidoscope of Hillary images and the frequently self-destructive behavior of the First Lady are particularly regrettable because both the Clinton Administration and the Clinton marriage are historic. As a couple, the Clintons raise important issues about both electoral and sexual politics. It is clear that without H.R.C.’s participation, Bill Clinton would have gone right down the Gary Hart sewer. Because his wife stood by him in that first Barbara Walters interview in 1992, because he did not exactly deny ‘causing pain’ in the marriage while Hillary held his hand supportively, the first Clinton campaign was able to weather and rise above what had been killing sexual crises for other presidential candidates. Unlike France, America does not coddle public adulterers. Only ‘the little woman’ can save them. She forgives, we forgive.
In those days – the first Clinton campaign – we were still hearing a lot about getting two for the price of one. Elect one, get one free. Hillary was the freebie. Never before in American politics had any couple campaigned this way. The very American ideal of a ‘power couple’ who add up to more than the sum of their parts was put on the ballot in the 1992 election. America was enthusiastic about it then. Indeed, the Clinton candidacy looked bravely feminist compared with the fuddy-duddy aura of Bush and Mrs Bush. But misogyny was far from dead, as we were soon to see.
The subsequent assault on Hillary demonstrated the entrenched woman-hating both of the American press and the bigoted public it so badly serves. When William Safire of the New York Times called H.R.C. ‘a congenital liar,’ surely he was subjecting her to a different standard from the one to which he had held other First Ladies. Can anyone in the laser glare of the public eye be expected to be candid all the time? Did anyone ask Pat Nixon what she thought of her husband’s destruction of evidence? Was Nancy Reagan interrogated about Irangate? Certainly not. But H.R.C.’s gene pool was impugned at the drop of a document. With the roasting of Hillary it became clear that when we wish women to fail, we decree for them endless and impossible ordeals, like those that were devised for witches by their inquisitors. If they drown, they are innocent; if they float, they are guilty. This has pretty much been the way America has gotten rid of its cleverest political women, from the feminists Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman to Eleanor Roosevelt and the unsuccessful vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. And there is no doubt that many people still wish H.R.C. to fail. Even now.
Clinton strategists – including the disgraced Dick Morris – kept Hillary out of the limelight for most of the campaign. She was only seen (but not heard) in proper ‘helpmeet’ photo-ops like the Atlanta Olympics, the Wyoming vacation and the exotic ports of call she visited with First Daughter Chelsea. America preferred – 58 per cent of men told pollsters that their view of Hillary was unfavorable – the duplicitous Southern charms of Elizabeth Hanford Dole: a driven career woman with no children who claims she is ‘pro-life,’ a chief Red Cross administrator who uses her powerful charity as a political tool of the Republican Party, a soft-spoken, flirtatious belle married to an old man, a saccharine public speaker who used the Republican convention in San Diego as an excuse to drown the delegates in treacle. Duplicity in women makes America comfortable; straightforwardness does not. There was even, I learned, heated debate in the White House about whether H.R.C. should speak at the Democratic convention or remain out of sight and earshot. After Liddy Dole’s San Diego seduction, it was decided that, however risky, Hillary had to speak. What a far cry from 1992, when Hillary was considered an asset! By the summer of 1996, she was a liability to be hidden. This is what four years of Hillary-hating had accomplished.
The deal of the Clinton marriage fascinates me and I suspect it fascinates a good portion of the electorate. It reflects our period better than any political marriage I can think of. Clearly Hillary figured out in law school that if the time was not yet ripe for a woman President, it was likely to be ripe for a guy as driven and smart and personable as Bill Clinton. And she could be his chief adviser, patron (she made the money – with no small help from his political position) and disciplinarian. However much she warmed to his Southern charm, no matter how much she loved him, his political ambition turned her on just as much.
Not that there is anything wrong with a marital deal. You might even say that the more things that bind a couple together, the better chance they have of staying together. But theirs is a radical deal for an American political marriage. H.R.C. has never staked out highway beautification as her bailiwick (as did Lyndon Baines Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird) or crusaded to put warning labels on rock albums (once the one-woman campaign of Second Lady Tipper Gore). On the contrary, she has claimed center stage with top policy issues – however politically naive she may have been.
This audacity dazzled at first. But then, why should a First Lady stick to so-called women’s issues? Hillary was always policy-minded, always loath to be ghettoized ideologically. She was always far more serious than Bill, even in college and law school. He was a people pleaser. She was a woman who put intellect first, which meant automatically that many men – and women – would not be pleased by her. One of the reasons she hooked up with Bill was that he was the first man who seemed not to be afraid of her intellect but rather challenged and attracted by it. He was determined ‘to get the smartest girl in the class,’ as an old Arkansas buddy of his told Roger Morris. He was sick of beauty queens. ‘If it isn’t Hillary, it’s nobody,’ he informed his mother, cautioning her to be nice to Hillary before he brought her to meet the family in 1972. Though he apparently had nostalgia – and a use – for those beauty queens after he and Hillary were married, at the time of their courtship Hillary’s brains thrilled him more. She excited him. Maybe she still does. After all, many powerful men yearn for the sting of a dominatrix’s whip now and then; it seems to be a sovereign tonic for hubris.
One of the difficulties of being a smart, driven woman is finding men who are turned on by brains. Hillary’s initial attachment to Bill probably had a lot to do with the excitement of finding such a fearless man. Later, it seems, she had invested so much of herself in the marriage and in the daughter they shared that she wasn’t willing to throw it all away even if faced with compulsive, repeated infidelities. The stresses on H.R.C. have been extreme, and one must say that despite them she has proved an exemplary mother. She has protected Chelsea from the media, allowed her the space to grow into womanhood, put her education ahead of politics. As the mother of a teenage daughter, I honor H.R.C. for what she has achieved.
Still, we have to look at the strangeness of the public image put forward by this revolutionary presidential couple: they were elected as a team but have absolutely refused to make the terms of their marriage public except to admit that he ‘caused pain.’ It is the inconsistency of this position that has accounted for a great deal of the trouble. If you vote for a couple, you feel entitled to know about the bonds that hold them together. But Hillary has insisted that those bonds are private. People resent her determination to have it both ways. But how on earth could the Clintons own up to the details of Bill’s sex life? The fact that they have quashed the issue thus far is nothing short of a miracle.
The more you read about Bill Clinton, the more it seems evident that not only were there affairs but that he used his position as governor to facilitate them, using state troopers as beards and panderers, getting them to pick up frilly little gifts at Victoria’s Secret. But I assume that his erotic life is no better and no worse than any other male politician’s. I am, in general so disillusioned with male politicians that I actually prefer Bill Clinton the womanizer to Bob Dole the deadbeat dad who dumped the first wife who nursed him through his famous war wounds. (Dole actually got his political cronies to arrange an ‘emergency divorce’ so he could jettison the old wife and family more cheaply.) Fucking is fucking, but failing to pay child support is a real crime. At least Bill Clinton didn’t abandon his wife and child.
Hillary’s history is full of paradoxes. A baby boomer who grew up in a straight-arrow Methodist Republican registered family in a white, upwardly mobile suburb of Chicago, she became a left-leaning Democrat at Wellesley College. At Yale Law School she WAS studious, solitary, solemn, given to wearing flannel shirts and thick glasses, noted for her brilliance and hard work. Her mother, a closet Democrat, had compromised with her life and did not want Hillary to compromise – a familiar mother-daughter story. Her father was stern, unambiguously Republican, tight with money and difficult to please. Imagine a girl like that winning the good ol’ boy who has been dating beauty queens! It gives you an idea of how much his ‘locking in on her’ (as one old friend put it) must have meant to her.
Hillary is an appealing figure to me because her life shows the strange compromises gifted women make. She had already changed her politics, drifted away from her parents’ reactionary attitudes. What lay ahead were other complete makeovers – looks, name, ideals. Everything would have to change for the greater glory of Bill Clinton and the pillow power he bestowed. If she has often come across as angry and unsettled, as constantly remaking her image, it is because this is the truth. How could she not be angry? Like an ancient Chinese noblewoman with bound feet, she has had to deform even her anatomy to get where she needed to go. She hobbled her own fierce ambitions to transplant herself to Arkansas and defend his. She gave up her end-of-sixties indifference to female fashion, her passion for social justice and her native disgust with hypocrisy. Then, while he used her feminism as a shield to cover his philandering, he proceeded to make a mockery of everything she believed in.
Since Bill Clinton had always been clear about his ambition to be a top Arkansas politician and then President, his path never changed. Hers changed constantly – and with it her hair, her eyes, her weight, her name. At some point she must have had to decide that all those changes were worth it. How else can a smart woman justify such a metamorphosis? She had to recommit herself over and over to life with him. No wonder she demanded paybacks, such as running health care reform and his public life. She would have felt demolished otherwise. One sympathizes with her strength to make demands. But the power struggle of the marriage inevitably influenced the power politics of the nation, and that is what is so radically new about the Clinton presidency.
George Bush used his first day in the presidency to congratulate ‘right to life’ marchers, even while insinuating that First Lady Barbara Bush did not agree with him. No such stand for Bill Clinton. He and Hillary were joined at the hip politically, however much stress their marriage might be under. Their presidency has redefined public and private. Both Clintons’ policies are in lockstep, even though their marriage may be chronically on the rocks.
‘We cared deeply about a lot of the same things,’ Hillary told an interviewer for the campaign film The Man From Hope in 1992. This revealing quote, edited out of the final film, makes the deal of the marriage clear. ‘Bill and I really are bound together in part because we believe we have an obligation to give something back and to be part of making life better for other people,’ she went on (as quoted by Bob Woodward in The Choice). The tragedy of their story is that such idealism had to be replaced by a ruthless commitment to politics, and this deformation of principle came much harder to her than to him. Hillary’s image problem has several root causes. One is undoubtedly the ineptness of her staff. Another is the undeniable fact that there is no way for a smart woman to be public without being seen as a treacherous Lady Macbeth figure or bitch goddess (our failing, more than Hillary’s). But the deepest problem is that Hillary comes across on television as cold and too controlled because that is the truth. She has rejigged her image so often, retailored it so much to please the spin doctors, that it comes across as inauthentic. It is.
The truth is that Bill is what he is – warm, tear-jerkingly populist, dying to please, woo and pander. He’s a born salesman, ‘riding on a smile,’ in the immortal words of Arthur Miller. Hillary, meanwhile, is a brainy girl trying to look like an Arkansas beauty queen, a corporate lawyer trying to look like a happy housewife, a fierce feminist who has submerged her identity in her husband’s ambitions. It doesn’t add up – too many contradictions – which is why we don’t believe it. The pearls and pink put on for the campaign – as well as the new, practiced smiling – are not totally convincing either. We expect Lady Macbeth to reappear, rubbing the blood from her hands.
We should weep for Hillary Clinton rather than revile her. She is a perfect example of why life is so tough for brainy women. The deformations of her public image reveal the terrible contortions expected of American women. Look pretty but be (secretly) smart. Conform in public; cry in private. Make the money but don’t seem to be aggressive. Swallow everything your husband asks you to swallow, but somehow keep your own identity. Hillary shows us just how impossible all these conflicting demands are to fulfill.
For Hillary and her generation, ‘no single act came to symbolize so vividly her role and sacrifice as the surrender of her maiden name,’ as Roger Morris points out in Partners in Power. Refusing to be submerged in the identity of wife is a burning issue for our generation. A woman can give up on this outwardly and continue to seethe inwardly. As with so many other Hillary transformations, the stress shows. I’m glad it does. It shows that she still has her conscience intact, if not her soul. She is not the consummately smooth performer her husband is.
Besides the constant hair transformations, nothing has shown Hillary’s discomfort with her role as much as her choice of Jean Houston and Mary Catherine Bateson as spiritual guides. For all the idiocies of the American press, which cheaply depicted Hillary’s spiritual quests as ‘seances,’ Houston and Bateson are serious figures. Bateson is a writer and anthropologist, who, like her mother, Margaret Mead, is fascinated with the changing roles of twentieth-century women. Like her father, the English-born anthropologist Gregory Bateson, she also has a deep interest in spirituality in the modern world. Houston is a respected spiritual teacher and author. It is to Hillary’s credit that she sought guidance from such interesting women. It also shows her deep need for reassurance in the midst of the nonstop Hate Hillary campaign that has been the salient feature of her public life. As Bob Woodward suggests, ‘Hillary’s sessions with Houston reflected a serious inner turmoil that she had not resolved.’
Apparently, Houston encouraged Hillary to take heart from her role model, Eleanor Roosevelt, and to use the technique of imaginary conversations with a mentor to confront her own deep hurt about the attacks, jealousy and misunderstanding she has encountered as First Lady. This is an ancient technique for building self-knowledge and resolve. It was used during the Italian Renaissance by Machiavelli. Nevertheless, Hillary has been ridiculed as the dupe of seance-mongers for her very human need to reach out for help. This is beyond unkind. It is cruel and unusual punishment. I would rather put my faith in leaders who acknowledge their human need for guidance than in those who will accept none. Hillary remains deeply troubled on many levels; I wish she could open herself to psychological help. But then, of course, she might have to leave Bill!
Hillary herself is in great speaking form these days: passionate, strong, determined. She has even learned to soften political discourse with smiles. Once again her hair has been redesigned, her jewelry is smaller and more ‘feminine’ – the safety of pearls – and some adviser has connived to dress her in pastels. You could say she’s on the Dole. She has been Liddyized. She frequently says, ‘My husband and I believe’ or ‘the President believes,’ and she allows no public space for those who would divide them. She is poised, cool, in control. The anger does not show. All that is missing is the sense of the real woman underneath the pretty makeup and softly tailored suit.
One wants to say Hillary is the hollow woman – but in fact the opposite is true: She is a seething mass of contradictions, so she dares let none of her feelings show. ‘Relaxed’ is not a word you would use about her even now. She gives off an aura of discipline and ferocious tenacity. It’s impossible to glimpse the human being beneath the mask. Yet all those stories of her breaking down in tears or rage in private after this perfect composure in public seem wholly believable. She seems to be holding herself together with hairspray.
What is familiar about this picture? A woman is sacrificed to her husband’s ambitions. Her personality is deformed. She takes almost all the flak in the press while he gets away with murder. You might almost say she is taking the punishment for him, and for all women who step outside the lines prescribed for paper-doll political wives – in fact, for all contemporary women. Hillary Rodham Clinton looks more to me like Joan of Arc every day. She is burned as a witch week in and week out so that her husband can rise in the polls. She is the scapegoat half of the Clinton duo, the rear end that gets whipped so the smiling Clinton head can triumph. She is Agamemnon’s Iphigenia sacrificed for a propitious wind, Euripides’ Alcestis going across the Styx instead of her husband.
And this is the way the Clinton presidential couple is conventional rather than revolutionary. Yes, they dared to present themselves as a team. But once again it’s the female half that gets trashed while the male half is forgiven for all his transgressions and winds up being President. Bill Clinton owes Hillary. Big. The only difference between him and other guys is that he seems to know it. History has burdened Hillary Clinton with changing the way powerful women are perceived in our culture. But if she can see herself as part of a historical continuum, as a pathfinder opening the way for her daughter’s generation, she may be able to rise above the pain of daily crucifixions in the media.
With a second Clinton Administration, H.R.C. has the rare opportunity to triumph over her detractors. She has already fulfilled her wish to be an Eleanor Roosevelt for the end of the century. In many ways her mainstreaming of feminism has prepared us to accept a woman President in the twenty-first century. By acting as a lightning rod she has gotten us comfortable with women who talk back in public, don’t hide their brains, don’t hide their passionate mothering. H.R.C. is the latest incarnation of Miss Liberty. I’m glad she’s a survivor. Her survival means I can survive. If the next Clinton ticket is H.R.C. and Al Gore, I intend to vote for them more happily than I voted for Bill Clinton on Tuesday.