Watching Silda Wall Spitzer standing close beside her disgraced husband one has to wonder, how bizarre can this backlash get? Must the new political wife wear the scarlet “A” atop her broken heart instead of smacking it firmly on her spouse’s chest where it clearly belongs? “I know about ‘Stand by Your Man,’ ” one of my best friends said, “but why at this moment?”
These days, when the press and pols tell all, successful women are forced to endure what amounts to a public stoning that could make any self-respecting feminist choke. For New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s wife, a former hot-shot lawyer who recently has devoted herself to running a children’s foundation, that means standing there taking the public humiliation alongside her “Eliot Ness,” now “Client 9.” Perhaps he forgot himself and focused only on his ascent to “Cloud Nine.”
Gone are the days of the stay-at-home political mom-wives in their good cloth coats. Now we have equality, lucky us, which seems to translate into forcing successful, and often beautiful, wronged political spouses with careers of their own into helping their husbands parade their sins. This bipartisan phenomenon — think Maria Shriver — seemed to start with Hillary Clinton, who set the standard for long-suffering spousal silence. But at least she got a political launch in exchange.
More recently, just before the Spitzer scandal, as we mused over Bill Clinton’s disastrous appearance in his wife’s presidential campaign, my husband stated that she should have simply left him over the Monica Lewinsky mess. I stared at him in disbelief, trying to imagine how Clinton might have pulled that one off. Maybe “OK Bill, you get the dog and Chelsea and I will keep the White House.” No, I told him, it wouldn’t have been possible. Of course, there was Rudy Giuliani, whose TV-star wife not only starred in “The Vagina Monologues” but stayed in Gracie Mansion when they separated during his mayoral tenure.
It’s a backlash of a whole new order.
Think back to the Clinton scandal. When Bill Clinton made his nationally televised admission, I recall turning to my husband and saying, “Good thing he’s not married to me because he’d be dead.” We laughed and that was that.
As far as cheating men go, I’ve always maintained that I don’t care unless it gets to the point where it starts affecting their jobs. Then I get cross, as I did when Bill Clinton’s second presidency was squandered on nonsense, including the 24-7 efforts to stop the scandal’s damage. Failing that, and that was a pretty unique situation, I adopt an “as-long-as-I’m-not-married-to-a-cheatin g-husband-like-Albert-Einstein-or-fill-in-the-blank” position on bad treatment of women. For me, it reaches beyond the domestic. When I teach ee cummings next to R. Kelly to my Columbia College students, I have to remind them that we judge the art not the artist. We focus on the poems and songs rather than the hotel rooms Mr. Kelly may frequent.
But I’m rethinking my view now that we’re in a no-holds-barred society. We seem to have gotten rid of the silent long-suffering spouse and replaced her with a display spouse, a woman forced to play an ugly public role in her own domestic drama no matter how the dignity of her own accomplishments ill-suits her for the role. Part of this stems from our desire to focus on the celebrities rather than the issues, an increasingly disturbing trend, but part of it comes from our longtime taste for the frisson of scandal, especially when it knocks the self-righteous off their pedestals.
This new trend of the strong career women reduced to silent, ashen-faced, suffering supporters makes them — and the men they married — into pitiful grotesques. And it feeds our need for round-the-clock melodrama. Of course we like that in America, almost as much as we like bringing down strong women.
We’ll know we have equality when we see as many — heck, even one cuckolded political husband standing by his woman under the glare of television lights. But that’s not much of a standard to which we can aspire.
Instead we should be asking ourselves why we want to do this to our wives and our daughters — and our sons?
