First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Earlier predictions of who would break through that last barrier centered on women holding lower elective office. Wide speculation was that the first female president would, like most male presidents, come out of Congress or a state governor’s mansion.1 Most probably she would be a lawyer and be married to someone who showed no interest in politics, such as Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Denis Thatcher. By 2008, the number of women who fit this bill had grown, and the question was less “if” a woman would be president than “when.” Nine of the fifty states had women governors, several of whom boasted achievement records that put them on the short list to serve as running mates or hold high appointive offices. In the 110th Congress, sixteen of the one hundred senators were women, including one ex–First Lady; two states, California and Maine, were represented by only female senators. In the 435-member House of Representatives, seventy-four members were women, and although critics complained that added up to a measly 17 percent, it equaled nearly a third of all women who had ever served in the House.2 The very first, Montana schoolteacher Jeannette Rankin, found the House a lonely place in 1917, when women in thirty-seven states could not even vote.3 Now, a female voice addressing Congress was hardly remarkable.

  Before Hillary, First Ladyship was not perceived as a springboard for the presidency, although American history is peppered with names of White House women who hankered to play the political game themselves. Sarah Polk (1845–1849) and Helen Taft (1909–1913) stand out as women who in another age might have chosen to run for office themselves. But education standards for women of their time left them ill prepared; strong bias against women in politics would have stymied their efforts in any case. Sarah Polk’s lament in 1843 that she could not go out campaigning with her husband but had to stay home where she had “not much to opperate [sic] on” indicates how completely she felt barred from the public political arena.4

  Barriers against women campaigning for their husbands did not fall easily. In 1964 Lady Bird Johnson traveled on her own through eight southern states, the part of the nation most hostile to her husband’s candidacy after he had signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that year. Her courage is all the more remarkable when compared to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reluctance. In 1940, when Eleanor realized the difficulty Franklin faced in seeking an unprecedented third term, she finally accepted the idea of campaigning for him. Although she had no compunctions about standing up for other candidates, a speech for her own husband did not seem “ladylike.”

  By 2008, such reluctance sounded quaint; several women, including the very persuasive Rosalynn Carter, had eagerly followed Lady Bird Johnson’s example. Now wives of candidates typically prepared for campaigns by signing up for speech lessons and hiring consultants. Half a century earlier, Mamie Eisenhower did not even indicate a preference for one candidate over another when she urged women to “please vote.” Now impassioned spouses abandoned nonpartisanship entirely and faced large audiences to tout a husband’s record and fitness for high office. That Laura Bush had raised $5 million for George’s 2004 campaign simply underlined the fact that the two-person job of presidency started well before the votes were cast.

  Spouses of both gender played an unprecedented role in the 2008 campaign, and one ended up a stronger figure than her husband. Elizabeth Edwards, a veteran of the 2004 race when her husband shared the Democratic ticket with John Kerry, had already captured popular sympathy with her poignant life story—which included the death of a child and a continuing battle with breast cancer. Now she became a powerful voice in her own right for health care reform. Bill Clinton, back at the center of national attention as he campaigned for Hillary’s presidential bid, made no attempt to duplicate Denis Thatcher’s detachment, causing voters to wonder what role he would play were Hillary to be elected. Cindy McCain, the brewery heiress, tried to limit her participation to standing modestly at her husband John’s side, but she ended up the butt of jokes about how many homes she owned. Michelle Obama, the first African American to campaign actively in a husband’s presidential run, was chastised as an “angry black harridan” when she talked of being “proud of my country for the first time.”5

  After her husband’s election, Michelle Obama made more headlines. A Harvard-educated lawyer and former hospital executive, she was accustomed to bringing home a paycheck that exceeded her husband’s Senate salary, but now she described herself as a stay-at-home “mom in chief.” Unlike the only other attorney to become First Lady, she felt no need to feign culinary interests by talking about cookie baking, and she used her first public event at the White House to celebrate a new law extending workers’ rights. This willingness to combine professional expertise and a traditional woman’s role marked something new—another sign that the 2008 election was an important turning point for women.

  The watershed moment had been a long time coming. Even after the 1920 amendment guaranteed women the right to vote, many chose not to use it, letting six decades pass before they equaled men’s numbers at the voting booths. By the time that happened, in 1980, a clear difference—a gender gap—showed up in voting patterns. Women favored candidates who supported what they liked: more government intervention to provide health insurance, day care, racial equality, and gun control. Women were decidedly less interested than men in issues such as the use of military force and expanded defense budgets.

  All these topics appeared on the debate list of Democrats vying for the 2008 nomination. The two U.S. senators left standing by February 2008, one a woman and the other an African American, agreed on most of the important issues, so talk turned to how gender and race might affect votes.6

  Many Americans could remember when neither women nor African Americans could vote in some states, but both populations had made enormous gains after 1965, when they experienced improved pay equity, gained fairer representation in professional schools, and took seats on the Supreme Court. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, few Americans admitted that either race or gender should disqualify candidates for high office, but it remained to be seen how they would vote when faced with a presidential candidate who was not a white male.7

  American history is peppered with names of women who stepped forward to offer themselves as presidential candidates, but their efforts were more educational than geared to victory. When the tiny Equal Rights Party put Victoria Woodhull at the top of its 1872 ticket, she got nothing more than a few headlines. The flamboyant stockbroker and her running mate, Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist and newspaperman, drew attention to the subject of equal rights for both women and African Americans but attracted few votes.

  The following decade, the Equal Rights Party, now renamed the National Equal Rights Party, nominated a lesser known candidate but one more qualified than Woodhull—attorney Belva Lockwood.8 A former teacher, she had earned her law degree at age forty-three and, in 1879, became the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. With another woman as her running mate, Lockwood managed to get her name on official ballots for president in 1884, but when the tallies came in she had won only a handful of votes. A second run in 1888, this time with a man, Charles Stuart Wells, as her running mate produced no better results, but the article she published fifteen years later, “How I Ran for the Presidency,” indicates how thoughtfully she prepared for the race, by working out detailed platforms and organizing rallies.9

  Decades would pass before women got their names on the ballots of either major party. In 1964, Republicans in a few states provided Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine, with enough delegate votes to put her name in nomination at the GOP convention, making her the first woman to win that honor from a major party.10 But she quickly withdrew, and Barry Goldwater was selected to head the ticket.

  In 1972, New Yorker Shirley Chisholm, who had already made history as the first African-American woman to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, put together an organization that collected more than 400,000 votes in primaries in twelve sta
tes, resulting in nearly 152 delegate votes at the Democratic nominating convention. But Chisholm recognized the odds against her moving into the Oval Office. That was not her goal. Rather, she wanted to “shake things up a little … [so that] the next time a woman of whatever color or a dark skinned person of whatever sex aspires to be President, the way should be a little smoother because I helped pave it.”11 Single-issue candidates occasionally ran, and one anti-abortion candidate, Ellen McCormack, became the first woman to qualify for federal matching campaign funds. But few people believed any one-issue candidate had a serious chance at the presidency.12

  Even women with good connections to major parties dropped out when money and support did not materialize. Pat Schroeder, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had won her first election to Congress at age thirty-two, had strong credentials when she explored a presidential run for 1988. In her seventh term as a U.S. representative from Colorado, she had done her homework in a variety of areas not usually considered women’s domain. Aware that political analysts believed any successful woman candidate for commander in chief had to meet the “Sister Mister” test, that is, have “the body of a woman with the character traits of a man,” Schroeder had gotten on House committees that dealt with the military and defense.13

  It had not been easy. As she wrote in her autobiography, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, unhappy with the fact that a woman and an African American had been assigned to his committee without his approval, announced that since women and blacks were “worth only half of one ‘regular’ member,” Schroeder would have to share a chair with Ron Dellums, an African American from California. Hard as it is to believe this could happen in 1973, she wrote that “nobody else objected and nobody offered to scrounge up another chair.”14

  Even that bizarre experience did not prepare her for the sexism encountered in her presidential bid. No matter how broadly she shaped her campaign talks, the media heard only women’s issues. And all they saw was what she wore. She complained she could be talking about the most serious issues, such as environmental controls or defense policy, and a reporter would ask why she was wearing red. A hectic schedule required traveling light, but when she wore the same dress twice in one week, she heard someone joking that she might have to miss an event because “her plaid dress was at the cleaners.”15

  When Schroeder announced she was dropping out of the race after only a few months, fatigue and disappointment combined to cause her to shed a few tears, and the media jumped on this as conclusive proof of her unfitness for high public office. For her, the most upsetting comment came from those who considered anyone who cried to be unfit to have a “finger on the nuclear button.” For her, those people had it all wrong—she wouldn’t want a commander in chief who couldn’t cry.16

  For years Schroeder kept a “sob sister” file with accounts of powerful men known to have shed a few tears. Such accounts included George Washington saying good-bye to his generals and Lyndon Johnson at a civil rights ceremony. But the fact remained, in many voters’ minds, that tears disqualified a woman as presidential material because they marked her as unstable, too emotional, not fit to lead.

  Elizabeth Dole could not match Schroeder’s elective successes but she had served as cabinet member, headed the Red Cross, and worked hard for her husband’s unsuccessful presidential run in 1996. In 2000, she decided the time had come for her to run on her own. But before any primaries were held, she dropped out, citing money problems and lack of public support. Her husband had not been much help by speaking publicly about her slim chances and hinting he might contribute to one of her rivals, John McCain. Short though it was, her candidacy nonetheless encouraged other women.17

  Hillary Clinton’s announcement in February 2007 looked more promising. Like Elizabeth Dole, Clinton had achieved major name recognition and publicity through her spouse. But her eight years as First Lady and her service nearly that long as a U.S. senator from New York had combined to give her some advantages. She was not alone in thinking she could do what no woman had done before her—capture a major party’s nomination. President George Bush, talking to a reporter about her chances, explained why he thought she, rather than Senator Barack Obama, would get the nomination: “She has staying power, star power, and money power. She brings a big organization that is well funded right off the bat … [O]ne of the lessons I learned is you have to be able to play the long ball.”18 Bush doubted Obama had the sticking power.

  A few months later, it looked like President Bush had it right, at least about Clinton. She had collected a huge war chest, and her campaign spent lavishly, showing the full confidence of a front runner. But by February 2008, a different story was being told. With just two candidates still in the race, the former First Lady was losing ground. On June 7, 2008, after Senator Obama had collected the necessary number of delegates to secure the nomination, she suspended her campaign. Supporters who crowded around her in the National Building Museum in Washington to hear her concession speech could hardly contain their disappointment, but she reminded them that they had helped her put nearly eighteen million cracks in the toughest glass ceiling of them all.

  Clinton and her campaign managers had struggled to put together a winning strategy, but they found the rules for female candidates were different. The nasty rumors and unsubstantiated charges against her went back to her First Lady days, when she had endured attacks more vicious than those leveled at any of her predecessors. As Garry Wills wrote, “Hillary Hate” became “a large-scale psychic phenomenon” complete with Hillary rag-dolls made for dismembering, talk show hosts commenting on her purported lesbianism and drug use, and song lyrics altered to conclude “that’s why the First Lady is a tramp.”19

  But her problem reached beyond personal characterizations and charges. It resulted from what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell described as a very old conflict between “gender norms for the performance of femininity and rhetorical norms governing public advocacy.”20 Cultural norms held that a woman should talk in nonconfrontational terms, sound compassionate, and reveal lots of little personal details that humanized her. But cultural norms were quite different for a leader, especially a commander in chief. Here the prize went to the decisive voice, one using strong argument and evidence to make a case. Hillary Clinton had decades of public speaking experience as a governor’s wife, First Lady, and practicing attorney. But she still struggled to develop a “feminine rhetorical style.” When she happened to tear up at an emotional moment or share a deeply felt personal conviction, she was accused, like women before her, of playing games or taking undue advantage.

  While it is true that some voters may have been so enthusiastic about a woman, any woman, in the White House that they would have voted for Hillary Clinton even if they disagreed with her on major issues, the old negative bias against all women candidates was more visible. The same comment that would have been deemed abhorrent if aimed at a member of a racial group was simply ignored if it targeted a woman. Consider the Republican strategist on CNN who argued that it was okay to “call some women a white bitch because that’s what they are.”21

  Television and newspaper reports focused on Hillary Clinton’s hair color and makeup and the cut of her suit and the height of her heel while rarely referring to such subjects for male candidates. When she objected to being treated differently, she was deemed testy. When she observed that TV debate hosts often pitched the first question to her, comedians parodied her for complaining. When Chelsea Clinton joined her on the campaign trail, the candidate was accused of “pimping” her daughter. The sexist treatment came from both men and women. When a female supporter of Republican nominee John McCain asked him what he was going to do “about the bitch,” he began his answer with a big laugh.

  In listing her qualifications for chief executive, Hillary included her First Lady years. Her most controversial ad began with the sound of a phone ringing and a voice asking if this call came “while your children are safe and asleep” and something was “hap
pening in the world,” who would you want to answer that call? Would it be “someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military? Someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world?” The ad ended with Hillary Clinton picking up the ringing phone.22

  Barack Obama pointed out that just living in the executive mansion hardly qualified as expertise. Judgment was what mattered, and Obama argued that Clinton’s vote in 2002 to expand President Bush’s war powers hardly showed good judgment. Her supporters replied that residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue did not necessarily prepare a person for the presidency but it did count for something. Encountering world leaders and national press on a daily basis, learning to juggle incredible demands, knowing how to choose the best staff and advisers and then rely on their judgment—all figured in the First Lady’s job as surely as in the president’s.

  The Clinton campaign could have pointed to considerable documentation that supported that view. One student of the executive branch wrote that the First Lady is “a senior counselor for the president—perhaps his closest and most trusted.”23 Bradley H. Patterson then enumerated the many ways Hillary Clinton had assisted the forty-second president—including five appearances in front of congressional committees and more than nine hundred appearances in three hundred destinations in the United States and abroad, on top of the five hundred public events in the nation’s capital.