A Labor Day Call to Arms

The Goddess is grumpy today, on a beautifully sunny Labor Day. I’m distressed by a political issue (I was going to steer clear of the topic for awhile, since my site is new and I want to focus exclusively on love). But I got to thinking last night (in a celestial rage) that what I’m about to say IS about love. Follow me, you’ll see what I mean. What I heard, which was on the Lehrer Show on television the other night, was a woman named Rosemary Goudreau of the Tampa Tribune, weighing in on Michelle Obama’s speech. “A lot of people are finding her a bit aggressive, a bit assertive.” Now this, she was saying in a tone that was clearly a tsk-tsk–as though issuing a cautionary tale to other women out there, particularly political wives but by extension, all wives, who are a “bit” aggressive, a “bit” assertive. May I say one thing: Up here in the pantheon, we goddesses are goddesses because we are MORE than “a bit” aggressive and assertive, but FULL-OUT aggressive and assertive. That’s how the gods want us, by the way. We got here for being strong–stronger than the gods, in many cases, and the idea that someone would shush us in that insidious tone (“Naughty, naughty! You’re going to lose out, you know!”) would, in my world, send that someone straight over a steep heavenly cliff. How insulting, how absurd, to think that a brilliant young lawyer might need to restrain herself from appearing assertive in this day and age! Where ARE we? Is this an industrialized nation, or what? England, India, Pakistan–do you think their people criticized Thatcher, say, or Benazir Bhutto, for being, um, well, “a bit assertive”? What’s worse is that many Americans believe they no longer hold wives, even political wives, to a standard of tradition, restraint and so-called “goodness”; that their notions of femininity have broadened sufficiently to accommodate the so-called “modern” traits in women–like aggression and agency, desire and need, ambition and sexual forthrightness. That sad, sweet image of the dutiful, modulated, muted, Perfect Wife we once held dear has vanished, this thinking goes, replaced with a new and powerful woman recognized as her husband’s equal both at home and in the work place. But I think back to the 1992 elections, when as a nation Americans insisted that their First Lady bend to the same model of nonassertiveness, nonaggression, nonambition, nonpower that Ms. Goudreau insists we’re asking of Ms. Obama. That, of course, was Hillary Clinton. Daily we watched as our new kind of celebrated Presidential wife, so outspoken and forthright and powerful, went through the process of being visually and aurally softened, emerging from each photo opportunity with more softly tailored and delicate pastel-colored suits, blonder hair, and increased talk of White House menus. HIllary Rodham Clinton was suddenly in the center of cookie-baking question: Did she or did she not bake cookies for Chelsea? (I brought this debate to one of the Gods in the pantheon, Zeus, to be exact, and he said to me with that gleam in his eye, Well, “I’d like my wife to bake cookies!” and so I threw a batch of S’mores at him. (Ones that I did NOT make.) The pressure in America was intense. Two years later, Hillary Rodham Clinton came to the public for help in amending herself, a task she openly admitted had simply eluded her. She was asking you, the public, for advice in establishing a more sympathetic wifely image–a cry for help by a woman whose real virtue, I would suggest, was precisely the fact that she didn’t have a cookie-baking image and therefore never bothered to create one. The front page headline in The New York Times on January 10, 1995 read: Hillary Clinton Asks Help In Finding a Softer Image. “I didn’t get this whole image creation thing,” she is reported to have said at a White House luncheon the day before. “I see what it can do but I’m not sure I get it.” What “it can do”, she knew, is transform the public’s enmity into adoration. All she had to do was lie; present herself differently in order reassure us that the dynamic she and her husband shared, the relationship they were in, conformed to the marital relationship we believe a couple should have; that nothing new and threatening was going on there in the White House. Not long later, on March 25 of the same year, she accepted a Servant of Justice award in New York at the annual dinner of the Legal Aid Society. Her opening anecdote referred to the time when she had just joined the faculty of a law school and was introduced as a new “lady law professor” to a male judge who told her he didn’t have any use for a lady law professor. But her point was not self-congratulatory but self-deprecating: she likened the trouble she had winning over such a judge to the trouble she feels she is having with a public who has made it clear it feels just the way the judge did. “I always have a little trouble getting my footing in new settings, in case you haven’t noticed,” she said apologetically. “But I just sort of stay until I get it figured out.” She got it figured out the next month, when Mary Tabor, reporting for the New York Times, announced “The American public is about to get a fuller look at another side of Hillary Rodham Clinton, one more in line with the traditional image of First Ladies.” The First Lady’s image, she went on to say, “will not be the Hillary Clinton of the health care battles or the one defending her investment practices or the one making campaign speeches for her husband. It would be the Hillary Clinton who was writing a book “about the need for better quality of family and community life in contemporary American society.” Referring to the First Lady from then on as “Mrs. Clinton,” rather than Hillary Rodham Clinton, which in earlier years the First Lady had made it known she preferred, the article said the book might help the the President’s wife “recast herself in the traditional image of nurturing wife and mother.” Let us hope that Michelle Obama, a gorgeous, brilliant lawyer and wife and mother and woman, clearly adored by her husband, never feels compelled to appeal to the public to help her form a softer, more likable, more traditional image–the image Ms Goudreau is asking for. Michelle is swell as she is. As is Hillary–the Hillary we see now, with her suits in soft colors or hard colors or whatever color she darn well pleases. Ladies, we must stop political wifes and ALL wives from feeling compelled to heed the demands of antediluvian forces that wish to keep women in a position they like to call “influential” but not in one that they call “power.” We are no longer a nation that has the luxury to insist that an entire gender assume a traditional role and convey an image that’s these forces call “likeable” and find unthreatening. Likeable women are fine, but they can be knock-down-drag-out assertive at the same time. Your country needs women who can help pay the bills, no? That’s what the statistics say. That’s what men want, after all. And besides, guess what? Some of the most powerful women on earth and in the pantheon bake astonishingly good cookies when they feel like it. Like one Martha Stewart, for instance. And like me. My white chocolate chip crunch cookies are divine. As, I’m sure, are yours. –The Love Goddess