. . . a Setback for Today’s Women

Elizabeth Dole--a.k.a Mrs. Robert Dole--was asked to give up her job in order to help her husband, the senator, get elected to the presidency of the United States. She agreed.

But it is not a run-of-the-mill job that she is forsaking. Dole is the secretary of transportation and the highest-ranking woman in an Administration that has been hostile to women’s issues.

For more than four years Elizabeth Dole has represented the friendlier face of the Reagan Administration to more than half the population. Her appointment may have been tokenism, but there was satisfaction in the fact that a woman representing a sex so historically immobile ran the department in charge of keeping the country moving.

She resigned to help her husband campaign, although he will keep his Senate seat while he is on the barbecue trail. This struck his wife as odd. “It’s somehow different for wives,” the secretary told reporters. And, by resigning, she reinforced the inequity.

No doubt Elizabeth Dole will be a good campaigner. Intelligent, hard-working and charming, she possesses a soft native Carolina accent that could prove irresistible to audiences below the Mason-Dixon Line.

She assures us that there was no suppliant pillow talk, though earlier in the year Sen. Dole was quoted as saying that his wife would have to quit her Cabinet post if he ran.

Instead, the unchanged conventions of society--the values that Mrs. Dole expresses as wanting to stand beside her husband--directed her to abandon her professional autonomy and give up a job that she says she loves.

After all, the importance of family values (cue words for less female independence in marital and child-raising matters) has been highlighted by the Reagan Administration. Indeed, the President praised her in these terms: “I understand your decision to leave and believe the reasons behind it will strike a chord with everyone who values the very human emotions that underlie public life at its finest.”

Some cynics say that she resigned because of dissatisfaction with her performance. Airplanes don’t run on time, although they increasingly run into each other. Highways are dangerous places, so Elizabeth Dole might have wanted out of this battered Edsel.

Even so, what will she do if her next job takes her to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? Perhaps she’ll follow the example of Rosalyn Carter, who craved a place in the Cabinet and served invisibly as a member. Or will she recede into ceremony and emerge only when her hearth is threatened, as Nancy Reagan has done?

No matter which style she adopts, what a waste of a Harvard-educated lawyer who has run a major government department for more than four years.

The odds are that Elizabeth Dole won’t get to the White House. Even if she doesn’t, she has provided a sad example for working wives. She has surrendered a post of prestige and power, the kind of position that more American women should have, to play the role of helpmate.

In so doing she teaches millions of American women the unfortunate lesson that they must give up their own careers for those of their husbands. Caught in less-celebrated turmoil between their husbands’ desire to move to a new city or even to have dinner on time, working wives need examples of independent, autonomous professional women whose causes are not their husbands’.

But perhaps Elizabeth Dole is testing her own political waters, and in 1992 will run for elective office. Will anyone ask her husband to resign to stand beside her?