Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers
Edited by Susan Morrison
Harper, 254 pp., $23.95
One striking aspect of Hillary Clinton's electoral career has been its persistence in the face of negatives that would have torpedoed many a less determined candidate long before Iowa. In short, a lot of people hate Hillary. There are right-wing nut jobs, antiwar activists, enemies of Bill who think she is his clone, friends of Bill who think she brought him down, fashionistas offended by her sensible suits, and fashionistas offended by the only flash of cleavage she ever revealed on the Senate floor. But perhaps the most agonized Hillary haters are middle-aged, middle-class white feminists whose hatred simmers in a stew of ambivalence, liberally seasoned with desire, frustration, and betrayal.
"Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary" could serve as a cookbook for that stew, though its contributors might bristle at the domestic metaphor. While individual essays address Clinton's pets, marriage, favorite books and foods, clothes, name, and hobbies (or lack thereof), the book's recurrent theme is the angst that "we" - the book's recurrent pronoun - feel about Hillary.
The derivative origins of her success are one source of that angst. While Hillary was once a problem for Bill, he is now a problem for her. Lionel Shriver is downright annoyed that our first viable female presidential candidate is riding "on her husband's coattails," while Judith Thurman explains that "Mrs. Clinton's strategic choice, complicity, or surrender in letting wifehood define her for the better and formative part of her adult life troubles and confuses many women."
Hillary is not just a wife; she is also a politician, with the hunger for power, capacity for compromise, and tendency toward dissimulation that politics demand. For some women this seems too much to bear. "She is willing to do whatever it takes," writes Elizabeth Kolbert, who grudgingly admires this trait even as it clearly disturbs her. Dahlia Lithwick caustically describes the candidate as "cold and dead inside, a political Tin Man without the axe and jaunty hat."
The double standard looms large here. In an essay that could be transcribed from a Women's Studies 101 lecture, linguistics professor Deborah Tannen offers a workmanlike analysis of how our expectations for women (feminine and conciliatory) and politicians (powerful and aggressive) are at odds, leaving women politicians like Hillary in an impossible bind. Katha Pollitt is lukewarm about Hillary but outraged by the vitriolic insults hurled against her, to the point that, she writes, "I come across one of these sulfurous emanations from the national collective unconscious and I want to sit down and write Hillary's campaign a check immediately. I want to knock on doors for her every Saturday from now until primary day, on which I want to vote for her - twice!"
This book's emanations from the feminist collective unconscious are all well and good, but a little goes a long way. As editor Susan Morrison puts it, "The defining events - some might call them bloopers - of Clinton's political progress have become well-worn touchstones. . . . There was her widely misunderstood remark about Tammy Wynette, her mutating hairstyles, the matter of her maiden name, the botched health-care initiative, 'cleavagegate,' and, most famously, the cookies-and-tea brouhaha." As promised, these events "turn up repeatedly in these pages," often with little in the way of new insight.
The best essays in this volume come from those who know how they feel about Hillary and those who eschew feelings altogether. Susan Cheever, an unabashed supporter, compares Hillary to the heroine of her favorite novel, Jo March of "Little Women," a comparison both plausible (in "Little Men" Jo gives up her career to help Professor Bhaer with his school, but by "Jo's Boys," she is a famous author) and sympathetic. Lorrie Moore eschews navel-gazing and the politics of the symbolic to argue that, in the face of our national challenges, Hillary's policies are what really matter. Mimi Sheraton's humorous exploration of Hillary's favorite foods repudiates the impulse to find deep meaning in her most trivial choices, and Susan Lehman's portrait of her as the consummate corporate lawyer -rather than the sell-out feminist - leads to a compelling, if not necessarily convincing, brief in her favor.
Whether Clinton tries to downplay or highlight her sex, it matters. While some feminists may yearn for the purity of the Shirley Chisholm campaign, Clinton is the first female politician with a real shot at the presidency. If she is elected, gender will inevitably come into play. What other women think about Clinton also matters: Women voters are a powerful electoral force, and Clinton needs their votes to win.
Though it may be important to understand how women see Hillary, "Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary" presents a homogenous set of viewpoints. Almost half its essayists write for The
Rebecca Steinitz is a writer, editor, and consultant who lives in Arlington.
