Hillary’s Role Resurrects an Old Arkansas Dilemma

In addition to selecting the “leader of the free world”--the phrase still thrills us, doesn’t it?--the U.S. presidential campaign of 1992 asks us to consider something closer to home: the duties of the wife.

Career or cookies? Ms. or Mrs.? Adornment or Adviser?

In just weeks, the campaign will be settled. But the spousal debate will not.

If there is doubt, I offer 3,000 miles of roads traveled and notebooks jam full as evidence that Americans are weeks farther, maybe years or lifetimes farther, from agreement upon the opportunities that should be afforded, or the restrictions imposed, on the spouse. More particularly in the case of this election, the wife.

Usually, voters put it this way:

“I can’t stand Hillary.”

“I like Barbara better than that husband of hers.”

Or some such.

I’ve heard it plenty, and the odd thing is that until now, I never asked anybody about spouses. They volunteered it.

This is a curious matter, delicate and indelicate, and overlaps two themes that have come to distinguish the election: family values and generational politics. Nobody knows the uneasy implications of the debate better than professional women in Arkansas.

Let’s begin with family values, something that makes a lot of people want to clear their throats, if not drive their clenched fists through the dining table.

Joanne Graham started working at the Worthen National Bank of Camden, Ark., 43 years ago when she was in high school. She’s now vice president. She is mother of two, grandmother of four. She divorced nine years ago after a long marriage. Graham believes her divorce was the result of her career gains and, finally, the friction with her husband that resulted when she was elected as the first woman president of Camden’s Chamber of Commerce.

It’s a familiar story. “For better or worse” doesn’t always account for her doing so much better, eh?

So what about career woman Hillary Clinton? What if her husband is elected? Is the national mood so antediluvian as to begrudge her a legitimate career in Washington?

“If she can’t be herself, it will ruin her. She will be as miserable as I was,” says Graham. “It would be unfair.”

And what would that suggest of the politics of family values in our national family?

Graham and other professional women in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas follow the campaign with particular heed to these questions, and to the rough and tumble that has engulfed Hillary.

In 1980, they saw Gov. Bill Clinton lose reelection after tongues wagged because attorney Hillary Rodham, Esq., chief family breadwinner, did not change her last name to his. Then she did, and Clinton made a comeback in 1982.

This time, they note, Hillary Clinton was a forceful figure in the early presidential primaries--she was offered happily as the second half of a two-for-one ticket, a candidate for the Cabinet, remember? Now, in the general election, the brassy, career-minded wife who alienated some homemakers is being tested at every turn by Clinton’s opponents. As a result, she seems to have retreated some from the hot beam of the stage lights and yes, back a step closer to the kitchen with her unwonted cookie recipe.

“She is a successful career woman, spouse and mother,” says Diane Atchison, an administrator at South Arkansas University Tech, who belongs to Hillary’s generation. “She should be proud of this, everyone should be proud of it. But if she didn’t step back, she would cause problems for the campaign, so I understand why she did.”

Isn’t this a curious allowance?

Since 1960, the portion of American women employed outside the home has increased by 27%. The figure for men declined by 10%.

Women political candidates, it appears, are doing better then ever and receiving greater encouragement from increasingly diverse quarters of society.

Call it a gender twist on generational politics. For many men, the generations are separated by the wars that cast shadows over their lives; for women, the generations are defined by opportunity and by attitudes regarding achievement.

But that doesn’t get us to the question Hillary Clinton may or may not have the opportunity to force: not what a modern woman can do outside the home, but what is expected of a married woman in the modern home (especially when the address is 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.)

Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan are the most recent examples of powerful and smart First Ladies who accepted their duty to demur in public.

Hillary Clinton strikes few, at least here in Arkansas, as the type for such a guise.

But still, even among women who have watched her for years, there are only groping thoughts as to why in 1992, a candidate’s wife would step back--why she would have to step back, even a little--as her husband seeks to step forward.

Maybe it’s because men resent her.

“If a woman was running, wouldn’t we expect her husband to have a career? We’d think something was seriously wrong if he didn’t,” says Midge Palmer, another of Hillary’s generation and the owner of Palmer Temporaries in Camden.

Maybe it’s because some women envy her.

“Women are jealous because she’s so damnable smart. A majority of women resent a strong, successful woman. You know it and I know it,” says Linnie Betts, a retired executive with Merchants & Planters Bank and a Camden civic leader.

Maybe where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Let’s not overlook the possibility that the more Americans learn of Hillary Clinton, the less they like her. Maybe she’s just not a likable person.

But that’s not the kind of sentiment you seek or expect to find in a wooded river-bottom city an hour south of Little Rock. More typical here is the dreamy wishfulness of Midge Palmer: “All I hope is that if Clinton wins, he serves eight years and then Hillary goes for it. That’s what I’d like.”

Far fetched, sure. But they said that about another Arkansas wife. I offer the story just to stir the pot.

Back in 1931, Hattie Caraway was appointed as caretaker to fill the U.S. Senate term of her late husband. Democratic Party officials needed time to decide which man should be given the reins for the long run.

When the election for a new term came up, Caraway did the unexpected: Only eight days before the election, she decided to run herself. She hit 39 cities, traveled 2,100 miles and spoke to 300,000 people. She won 61 of 75 counties and got as many votes as her six male opponents put together. She was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

Not that she was a fireball feminist, you understand.

“The windows need washing,” reportedly was her first official remark to the Senate. She explained her unobtrusiveness in Washington by saying, “I haven’t the heart to take a minute away from the men, the poor dears love it so.”