Clinton Travails Engender Angst Among Women

At the YMCA in Quincy, Mass., Thursday, Debbie Hennessey, Jean Lydon and Alma LaPaz were watching children on the playground. As has become their habit, they were also discussing the ubiquitous topics of the day: Whether Hillary should leave Bill, whether Monica took advantage of everyone or was taken advantage of herself, whether the president’s peccadilloes are old news or an affront to all womankind.

A little girl raced toward the jungle gym, and Hennessey, 29, reached out to slow her down. “I have no problem with Mr. Clinton,” Hennessey said. “I have a problem with Hillary Clinton not taking a stand on it.”

“Well, I have a problem with him. I wouldn’t put up with this for a minute,” said Lydon, 37. “That’s what this is about: how much you respect yourself as a woman, how much you’re willing to take.”

LaPaz, 21, made a face of disgust. Monica S. Lewinsky was just her age when she and the president initiated their “improper relationship.” “To me, it’s nasty. It’s setting such a bad example, all of it. It makes it seem like what she did is fine, like other women would be willing to do the same thing, like if you want a job, that’s how you go about getting it. I think it speaks low of women, all women.”

LaPaz and her friends are neither political junkies nor fervent feminists. But in puzzling over Washington’s sex scandal, they are not at all unusual. Around the country, women are venting a complicated set of emotions about the White House sex scandal. What is happening is no psychosocial gender gap but rather, said UCLA historian Joyce Appleby, “a fascinating public engagement that is going to resonate for years.”

Women support President Clinton in almost the same numbers as men, and women and men have virtually the same opinions about resignation or impeachment, the most recent Times Poll found. But often, the feelings women express to one another--in the grocery store, on college campuses, at a child’s soccer game--reflect conflicts and confusion about their own lives.

Who is the victim here, women wonder, and who is the manipulator? Have women in their 40s and 50s struggled for the illusion of professional parity only to watch girls in their 20s resort to tired old sexual chicanery? When should a smart, articulate woman with a powerful political agenda turn mute and, yes, stand by her man?

On the playground at the YMCA in this working-class community south of Boston, Debbie Hennessey said the first lady’s silence is a major letdown. “I think all the work she has done--and it’s a lot of good work--I think it’s diminished now. Something like this is so very basic: You just don’t let a man treat you like this. It diminishes her, and in a way it diminishes all of us.”

“You don’t think she knew all along?” Lydon shot back. “Anyway, it’s nothing new. She’s been putting up with this for years.”

“You think that makes it any better?” Hennessey asked. “That makes it worse.”

Clinton’s Predicament Has Added Dimensions

Once they are done musing about whether the president’s proclivities do or do not threaten the republic, middle-age men who study Clinton’s predicament may pause to ponder if they too might take up with a co-worker not much older than their own firstborn. Maybe secretly, if they are honest, they confess to a whisper of envy.

For women, the dialogue has other dimensions. Philosophical differences between women who have labored in the trenches for a generation or more and those born into a relatively emancipated workplace are more noticeable than ever. Some young women all but yawn and say what did you expect? Some of their elders, well aware that they sound more like maiden aunts than the supportive big sisters they once thought they would be, reply: We expected better.

“What I hear from some women Monica’s age is that they kind of empathize with her: a man in power, a man who is good-looking, a man who is supposed to be so charming,” said fiftyish literary agent Sandra Dijkstra of Del Mar, Calif. But many women her own age “feel that Lewinsky solicited this, and that is a betrayal. That’s against the rules. That’s what we worked to eliminate.”

Sexual harassment, love and marriage, divorce and dignity, work environments that may accommodate women without fully welcoming them: Even women who concede that there are better things in life to worry about than the White House peep show find themselves drawn to its wide-ranging implications.

In Los Angeles, a tenured faculty member at UCLA telephoned three younger colleagues before she finally got a definition of thong underwear. In Cambridge, Mass., novelist Anne Bernays, who is in her late 60s, said she and her husband, author Justin Kaplan, had a serious discussion about “why there is no male cognate for the word ‘slut.’ ”

Still, Bernays admitted her head spins when she tries to make sense of the scandal. “Nothing is uncomplicated in this whole story. All the rules have changed. I keep going back and forth.”

More so than perhaps any of his predecessors since John F. Kennedy, the president has cultivated a charisma that snows many women. “Tall and absurdly debonair,” former New Yorker Editor Tina Brown--nobody’s idea of a pushover--wrote in the magazine, “a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room.”

Clinton also has preached egalitarianism, boasting of his record in appointing women. He has grown teary when discussing his relationship with his mother, another sympathetic hot button for many women. But in the wake of the Starr report, some of that sensitive stuff is wearing thin.

“I’m angry at the president for getting [Cabinet secretaries] Donna Shalala and Madeleine Albright to lie. I think they should resign because of that,” Appleby said.

For many women, observed Appleby, 69, impatience over the presidential style is seldom far from the surface. “I have a Meals-on-Wheels route,” delivering food to elderly shut-ins. “Some of those women are just livid. They can’t wait to talk to me about it.”

The absurdity of a president mired in a comic sex opera makes some women more aware than ever of what they disliked about him long before Lewinsky. Author Barbara Ehrenreich, who teaches at UC Berkeley, said she now feels “pain at Clinton’s hypocrisy” in that “he has presented himself as a family values president--and then he signs a welfare reform bill that contains the insulting provision that there should be money for abstinence training for welfare mothers, as if that were their problem. I can’t forgive that.”

Ehrenreich, like so many others, said she has trouble dismissing the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship as something for the first family alone to sort out. “If it is private, to be very concrete about it, he might have shut the door.” Besides, she said, “one of my reactions is not in the wife part of my brain but from the mother part of my brain.”

At Concerned Women for America, a public policy organization in Washington that stresses the value of marriage, Carmen Pate, the group’s president, also worried about the message going out to young women. Pate said the ramifications of the scandal are a constant topic among women she knows and works with. One frequent theme, she said, is that “marriage has been devalued in our society, and this doesn’t help. We’ve lowered our standards so much that young women today are not sure what to expect in a marriage.”

Students Debate Clinton Affair

These questions nagged at seven students who sat in the library Thursday afternoon at Tacoma’s University of Puget Sound. “One of my biggest fears in life is to have a marriage, have a kid, and then the marriage fails. I’m not picky, but I know what I want and what I don’t want, and I’m not going to settle,” said Maxine Cram of Seattle. “My husband cheats on me, he’s going to be out of the house that day.”

Her friend Joanna Orman, a sociology student, said it came as no shock to learn of the president’s latest affair. “The people that go into that position are the kind of people who have affairs. This is an old record that’s been playing over and over and over again. He’s a people person. It doesn’t really change my view. But with the lying, I think he’s lost all credibility.”

No kidding, concurred Autumn Inglin, a violinist. “Clinton ran on a platform that was hugely centered on change, changing the status quo. The more we find out about his presidency, the more we see he’s just the same. I don’t understand how women’s groups can ever support him.”

And the consequences of the president’s actions may extend far beyond politics, Amanda Jacobsen predicted. “My dad cheated on my mom, and when he did, he lost a big privilege: He lost his family,” said the international political economics major from Boise, Idaho. “My husband will know the same thing: If he cheats, the marriage is over. I grew up in a single parent household, and I turned out OK. I respect Mother for throwing him out. I have a good relationship with both parents, but I still have that undying respect for my mom because she did what she thought was right for me and my sister.”

And what of Lewinsky? Was she a victim or a seductress, and why, as a matter of fact, was the question even being asked?

As an assistant professor of education, composition, rhetoric and gender studies, Heather Bruce remarked, “one of the things very curious to me is this new construction of female desire and sexuality that has become very public with Monica. She breaks a lot of stereotypes. She’s an upper-class woman who is behaving in a way we would expect prostitutes to behave, servicing a man in power. Here we have an upper-class woman sort of crossing the lines. It’s giving us a new metaphor for sexuality in our culture.”

In many ways, as these women set out into a world whose presidents are still, more often than not, men, they acknowledged that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s dilemma may well become their own.

“Today, a woman cannot be president. She has to be the president’s wife. She worked as hard as he did to get there. Now he screws up, and people expect her to say, ‘Oh, OK, I’m going to divorce him now.’ If she dumps him now, she loses everything,” Orman said.

But LaTawna Robinson, a psychology major from Rancho Cucamonga, argued that Hillary Clinton had more to gain by making a firm moral assertion, by not joining in her husband’s prevarications. “She should have left him. I lost some respect for her when she decided to stay. She’s smart in her own right; she’ll still have that clout. But self-respect and dignity have to come before politics.”

If there is a model for those qualities, the students turned to a peer: the young woman who often goes unmentioned in the unraveling drama, but whose experience has moved them to cast a glance at their own fathers, and to wonder. It’s bad enough to deceive the nation, these young women agreed, but President Clinton crossed an equally formidable moral frontier when he betrayed his own daughter.

“I think I would feel so betrayed, so confused,” said Inglin, 20. “I think I would be sick.”

But metaphors, theories and philosophy aside, the squalid story spinning out of Washington offers one more lesson, Orman said, a chilling one at that.

“Being a woman now is scary,” said Orman. “To look at it, marriage is a very scary institution.”

Mehren reported from Quincy, Mass., Murphy from Tacoma, Wash.