One was born in Mozambique, relishes life on the campaign trail and speaks unapologetically about her Botox injections and prenuptial agreement. The other runs a busy medical practice, prefers jeans and sweaters to designer clothes and shrinks from the limelight that inevitably seeks out a presidential candidate’s spouse.
Teresa Heinz Kerry and Judith Steinberg Dean may be polar opposites in almost all respects, but they have this much in common. Both are married to men who are running for president, and both are learning how to calibrate their distinctive personalities to the demanding and sometimes limiting expectations that come with being married to a man who might one day be in the White House.
Those expectations start long before their spouses reach the White House. After former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean surged to the front of the Democratic field, his wife’s absence from his campaign drew criticism from some voters and political observers. Now that Sen. John Kerry has replaced Dean as the front-runner, attention is zeroing in on Heinz Kerry, who, far from shying away from the limelight, frequently appears with her husband or alone.
“What I like about the kind of politicking of Iowa and New Hampshire in particular is that it’s pretty intimate,” said Heinz Kerry, who talked about her high-profile role in her husband’s campaign during a telephone interview. “People want to have a conversation. They’re not cynical. It was fun, and I think people responded to it.”
Reflecting the broad range of how American women define themselves as spouses, the wives of the Democratic presidential contenders are playing widely varying roles in their husbands’ White House bids.
Outspoken and out front, Heinz Kerry, 65, is a force to be reckoned with, an independently wealthy woman immersed in such public policy issues as the environment, education and health care.
Playing more traditional supporting roles, such as speaking to women’s groups and appearing at their husbands’ sides, are Sen. John Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, 54, and Gert Clark, 60, who is married to retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
“My job is to be a window,” Elizabeth Edwards told television interviewer Charlie Rose. “When I go out, I want people to look through me and see John.”
Dr. Judith Dean, 50, is a practicing physician whose career and lack of appetite for the political fray made her a rare public presence until Dean’s campaign started to sputter in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Kathy Jordan Sharpton, 47, has not campaigned for Al Sharpton, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich is divorced.
Two-career couples like the Deans are common in America, but the questions that the former governor faced about his wife’s absence showed that presidents and their wives still operate under older assumptions about the role of women in a marriage.
Lewis Gould, a University of Texas historian, calls the presidency a “lagging cultural indicator” that runs 10 to 15 years behind the rest of the country.
“When Americans choose their president, they want to know that there’s a solid family underpinning,” said Gould, a specialist in the history of first ladies. “Does the marriage work? How are the children brought up? And the first lady becomes part of that equation. You can’t step back or opt out of that.”
Considering the intense scrutiny and unvarnished criticism that comes with being married to a presidential contender, the reluctance of Judith Dean, a family-practice physician in Burlington, Vt., to appear with her husband is perhaps understandable. A story about the Deans in London’s Sunday Times was headlined, “Heck, this is one strange marriage.”
First Lady Laura Bush expressed support for Judith Dean’s decision in an interview last week with The New York Times. “I think she made the decision that was right for her,” she said.
Elizabeth Edwards, a lawyer who had two children in her late 40s and early 50s after the couple’s 16-year-old son was killed, is regularly described as the matronly counterpart to the youthful-looking Edwards.
And a New York Times writer recently referred to Judith Dean’s “unyielding frumpiness” and Heinz Kerry’s “blowsy sensuality.”
“There are certain expectations we have about first ladies,” said Molly Meijer Wertheimer, author of “Inventing a Voice: The Rhetoric of American First Ladies in the 20th Century.” “Whether they like it or not, they have to conform to the image. They have a lot of latitude, but they can’t be too far out.”
First ladies of the last 100 years fall into three categories, according to Myra Gutin, a communications professor at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J.
Gutin describes the most traditional presidential wives–such as Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower–as “ceremonial” because their White House role was largely confined to entertaining.
Jacqueline Kennedy and Pat Nixon are examples of “emerging spokeswomen” because they stepped out, at least partially, from their husbands’ shadows.
Activist first ladies
And then there are the “activist” White House wives, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who adopted causes such as civil rights, cancer prevention and health care.
Until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gutin placed Laura Bush in the ceremonial category, but since then, her higher-profile involvement in literacy and other issues has made her an emerging spokeswoman.
“A first lady is fine as long as she’s involved in a project or picks a topic that we find feminine,” said Gutin, who is writing a biography of Barbara Bush, the wife of President George H.W. Bush.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a senator from New York, headed the Clinton administration’s failed effort to pass comprehensive health-care reform and was the target of criticism because, as Gutin said, she “crossed over into the area of public policy, and the first question people ask is, `And who elected you?'”
Heinz Kerry, the daughter of a Portuguese doctor, grew up in Mozambique and inherited a fortune now estimated at $550 million when her first husband, Republican Sen. John Heinz, was killed in a 1991 plane crash. She said that if her husband wins in November, she will remain chairwoman of the philanthropic foundations funded with the Heinz ketchup and pickle fortune.
If she resigned the position, “I would dry up,” she said. “That’s what keeps me alive and excited. It’s intelligent work; it’s practical work. It’s non-partisan work.”
She dismisses the possibility that running the Heinz foundations, with endowments of more than $1 billion, could lead to conflict-of-interest problems.
“Remember, we have a board of trustees who don’t owe my husband a thing,” said Heinz Kerry, who started using her husband’s last name after he entered the presidential contest. “I’m sure a number of them won’t vote for him.”
But unlike Sen. Clinton, she said she would not seek to run a major policy initiative in a Kerry administration.
“I have never told my husband how to vote for something,” she said. “Do we discuss issues and does he ask me what I think? Yes, and I tell him. The important thing is to be yourself, to support your spouse, to keep them as your best friend and keep them healthy.”
Working outside White House
In the future, Gutin said, there may be a fourth category–“working professional,” a first lady who keeps her job while living in the White House, as Judith Dean said she would if her husband is nominated and wins in November.
That arrangement worked in Vermont, where her husband was governor for nearly 12 years.
“The governor in Vermont does not have a mansion, and he doesn’t have to do a lot of entertaining,” said Kathy Hoyt, who served as Dean’s chief of staff. “People didn’t think it was unusual for her to have her own practice and keep the home going.”
But Texas’ Gould doubts such an arrangement would work on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“What people don’t understand is that there’s a high degree of institutionalized obligations that a first lady has–events, traveling on foreign trips, having a cause,” he said. “It’s almost like a mini-presidency within the White House, and that beast needs to be fed.”
