Shadowboxing with Stereotypes: The Press, the Public, and the Candidates' Wives

Abstract

The election year 1992 was widely touted as the "Year of the Woman." Certainly it was a year in which the attitudes of and toward women played an important role, and a year in which candidates' spouses were both the objects of attacks and potent political forces in their own right. A wholly traditional political wife, Barbara Pierce Bush, reached new heights of popularity, whereas Hillary Rodham Clinton, a highly esteemed corporate trial lawyer with a substantial record of public service work in education and as an advocate of children, was viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility by a significant segment of the electorate. These reactions are reminders that if feminism is not dead-and its demise has been announced regularly since the early I970s- women's advances are slow and difficult and often an outgrowth of external events. Just as woman suffrage came in part because of a climate created by the progressive movement and by Woodrow Wilson's World War I speeches declaring that this was a war to make the world safe for democracy/ so changed attitudes toward presidential spouses may occur as much as a function of the economic climate and the changed social and economic circumstances of women and families as from increasing support for issues and attitudes previously associated with contemporary feminism.