First Ladies (61 page)

By the time the Clintons moved into the White House, young Americans showed the effect of changes in the 1970s and 1980s. In education, girls had evened out the odds, and by 1991, white females who graduated from high school were more likely to go on to college than were males.
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Old quotas that had held down the numbers of women admitted to professional and graduate schools faded or disappeared, and by 1990, women collected a sizeable fraction of degrees granted: 34 percent of those in medicine; 31 percent in dentistry; 42 percent in law; 25 percent in theology; and more than half of the doctorates awarded in education, foreign languages, health sciences, literature, psychology, and public affairs.
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At work, the change was reflected in the numbers of women holding full-time jobs. When Barbara Bush's oldest child entered elementary school in 1952, it was the unusual mother in a two-parent household who went outside her home to work, especially when her children were very young. By the time Chelsea Clinton entered grade school, more than half of the nation's mothers with children her age held a job.
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Young children developed strategies for managing on their own, leading to discussions of “latchkey” children, and they learned it was not necessarily their mother who should be summoned in case of emergency. Chelsea Clinton was simply doing what she had been taught when, soon after her father became president, she took sick at school and requested that he be called “because my mother's busy.” Bill Clinton explained to amused reporters that he had generally been the more reachable parent, as governor of Arkansas, while his wife's law practice kept her away from the phone for hours at a time.

A new generation of Americans grew accustomed to seeing women in places of power and influence: their actions covered on the front pages of important newspapers and their pictures in television programs of substance. First Ladies before 1993 had come of age when women in politics were rare and those who ventured to run for office found themselves denigrated as “hard,” “unfeeling,” and “unfeminine.” Barbara Bush grew up in a Republican household where she later admitted the name of Eleanor Roosevelt was associated with models to avoid rather than emulate. Hillary Rodham Clinton also had conservative, Republican parents, who held no great admiration for the activist Democratic First Lady but they did not allow those negative feelings to diminish their aspirations for their daughter. Her mother really hoped, she later admitted, that Hillary would be the first woman on the Supreme Court.
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Dorothy Rodham believed that barriers against women in high government jobs would lift in her daughter's generation and she was right. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Three years later the Democratic Party achieved a “first” of its own when it named Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run with Walter Mondale of Minnesota for the top two political jobs in the land. Female members of the president's cabinet ceased being a novelty, and the number of women legislators climbed slowly but steadily. By the time the 103rd Congress took seats in 1993, women claimed six places in the Senate and forty-eight in the House of Representatives. On the state level, they did even better, winning nearly twenty percent of the total posts.

Some women holding high political office admitted they had entered the field because they had tired of feeling shortchanged by their government. Across the nation, a “gender gap” in political consciousness that had been predicted even before women were permitted to vote finally showed itself. Women demanded help from their legislators on a long list of problems that seemingly shaped their lives
and altered their happiness more than men's, such as health care (including the right to terminate a pregnancy), family leave, environmental concerns, and gun control. Not a few were shocked into political action by what they perceived as government's unfair treatment of other women, including Anita Hill when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the conduct of a potential appointment to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas.

Mothers who had formerly been dismissed by their representatives as unimportant ladies in “tennis shoes” suddenly showed confidence to take on government—and become part of it. Patty Murray, running for U.S. Senator from Washington in 1992, flaunted as her campaign slogan a phrase that had upset her a few years earlier when she had been dismissed by a legislator as too insignificant for his attention. Now Murray asked people to “vote for a Mom in tennis shoes.” Such pairing of maternal status and legislative competence would have been ludicrous a generation earlier when women seeking political office or high corporate jobs played down their family status. Male candidates had traditionally paraded out their entire households—wife, children, even parents and pets—but women, for whom these same attachments carried fewer positive appeals, tended to hide their family links. Pat Schroeder, congresswoman from Colorado, in an exception to the rule, had greeted fellow legislators with the wry announcement that she possessed a “uterus and a brain and they both work.”

The gains women made might have been expected to change perceptions of candidates' wives and make an activist, career-minded Hillary Rodham Clinton look particularly appealing. Voters accustomed to seeing women in high office might predictably rate a male candidate higher if an accomplished spouse ran alongside, especially if he admitted he intended to seek her advice and value her counsel. Long used to the idea that a candidate's wife became part of his record and that her success as wife and mother entered into any evaluation of his fitness for office, Americans now had the chance to extend their scrutiny to include a woman's professional record. Much about the Clintons encouraged speculation.

Born on October 26, 1947, in a Chicago suburb, Park Ridge, Hillary Rodham Clinton had grown up in a comfortably middle-class home. Daughter of Hugh Rodham, who owned a small fabric store, and Dorothy Rodham, full-time wife and mother, she was the oldest of their three children (and the only girl), and played the classic role of the first-born who tries so hard to please. When her parents encouraged her to do everything that her brothers did, she took them seriously. “I was determined,” Dorothy Rodham later told the
Washington Post,
“that just because she was a girl didn't mean she should be limited.”
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Circumstantial evidence suggests that Dorothy Rodham may have felt that her own generation of women had been shut out. Her education had not gone beyond high school, but as an adult, she enrolled in a community college to take courses for her own satisfaction, or as a neighbor explained “just for the thrill of it, just to do something with her mind.”
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Hillary's desire for risk and adventure, along with her displeasure at being excluded because of her sex, may well have come from her mother. In junior high school, Hillary decided she wanted to become an astronaut, and NASA's explanation that the job was closed to women was “infuriating” she later told the
Washington Post
.
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Hillary's father, with the kind of scrappy personality that often marks an immigrant background and a college education (at Penn State) made possible by an athletic scholarship, prodded his daughter to try harder. She recalled that he played down her early academic successes so as to nudge her into doing more. His good judgment earned her permanent respect, and after his death, in April 1993, she lamented that she could no longer turn to him in difficult days at the White House.
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On top of the parental grounding, Hillary ingested a strong dose of Methodist training that directed her toward many of her choices. As a youngster, she attended the Methodist church, whose founder John Wesley had taken as an important creed: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” In her case the religious training had been reinforced by other events at the time she came of age—in the 1960s—when talk of “what you can do for your country” and of the Peace Corps and community involvement drew many young people into public service. By the 1990s, when Americans came to know more of Hillary Rodham, such talk appeared dated, if not naïve and suspiciously self-serving, but two decades earlier, it had been common and often sprang from genuine conviction.

High school for Hillary included the chance to develop some of the skills and ideas that she would later transfer to the national arena. Class officer and organizer, she learned to speak in front of a student body of several hundred and when she graduated in 1965, classmates singled her out as the girl in her class most “likely to succeed,”
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an accolade that signaled both affability and perseverance. Her political philosophy was still in the making because she combined what appears to have been genuine commitment to social progress with a
hearty distaste for big government. As a high school senior, she backed Republican Barry Goldwater for president, and when she entered Wellesley College in September 1965, she did so as a Goldwater Republican.

Four years at Wellesley changed her perspective, but it would be unfair to credit college alone with achieving that shift. By 1968 she was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy
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as he challenged incumbent Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. McCarthy's run evolved out of the anti-war movement which, by March 1968, had helped drive Johnson out of the race, but other forces were at work challenging the old order of things. A fledgling feminist movement, a strong civil rights fight, and various other reforms aimed at improving education, cleaning up prisons, and protecting the environment had encouraged many people to rethink their lives.

The late 1960s, when Hillary Rodham was at Wellesley, could qualify as among the most exciting years of the century in which to come of age. A sense of power permeated campuses and encouraged students to think they could do anything they chose—close down a university, end a war, or send a powerful president into retirement. When Martin Luther King was gunned down, and then scarcely two months later Robert Kennedy met the same fate, individuals who had never shown much interest in government decided it was time to get involved. For those who had been nurturing an obligation to help others, the impulse grew too strong to resist.

In college, Hillary Rodham honed the leadership skills she had developed in an Illinois high school and turned them to serve her new convictions. While majoring in political science, she had the opportunity to work out some of her ideas on exactly how societal change could come about, and increasingly she turned to the idea that government should play a larger role. One of her professors wrote, in recommending her to law school, that he had “high hopes” for her. “She has the intellectual ability, personality, and character to make a remarkable contribution to American society.”
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Elected head of campus government, she and her classmates convinced the college president to break an old tradition and let a student speak at commencement. Hillary was chosen. Such student interventions in areas once firmly under the administration's control were not unique to Wellesley. In the late 1960s many college officials learned to accommodate students' requests for a larger role—to evaluate professors, help shape curriculum, and decide the sources from which a college got its money and the places it invested. Graduates frequently embellished their academic gowns with anti-war symbols or rejected
them entirely in favor of faded dungarees and slogan t-shirts. Audiences often became vocal about their disregard for a particular speaker or for the views expressed. Heckling was common; noisier disruptions not unknown.

At Wellesley's commencement in June 1969, the principal speaker, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, had not yet fully recognized the meaning of these changes. Fifty years old and a man of considerable achievement, he had sat through many of these ceremonies where audiences expected to hear trite exhortations about “the road of life.” He gave the kind of speech that he had always given, dealing in generalities and optimism rather than alluding to the problems of the day.

Hillary Rodham, who followed Senator Brooke to the podium, decided to buck old traditions about deference and say what she thought. Her prepared remarks gained no high marks for brilliant organization or polished delivery but did raise eyebrows for their attacks on the old guard. She chastized her elders, saying the choices they had made were no longer acceptable to her generation. Their “acquisitive and competitive corporate life … is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living. … “ Many in the audience, not yet used to hearing young people criticize their elders publicly, were dismayed. Among those attending were several distinguished statesmen, including Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, and Paul Nitze, deputy secretary of defense during the Vietnam years. In reporting on graduation ceremonies across the nation,
Life
published Hillary's picture alongside photos of several of her contemporaries who had also spoken out.
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Law school appeared the next logical step, and by the time Hillary applied in 1969, Yale stood high among the possible choices. It had already achieved a reputation for turning out graduates geared to public service rather than profit alone, and it had begun accepting a sizeable number of female applicants. Hillary's enrollment at Yale led to an important fortuitous meeting during her first year. As a result of a speech she heard by Yale alumna Marian Wright Edelman, an African-American only eight years her senior, Hillary redefined her career plans.

Edelman had accomplished a great deal in the few years since collecting her law degree. After working as an attorney for the NAACP, including four years at the Association's Legal Defense and Education Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, she had helped start the Washington Research Project, a public interest group in the nation's capital.
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Much about the quiet but inspiring Edelman appealed to Hillary. Not
only did Edelman seem committed to using a prestigious law degree in public service but she evidently meant to combine career with a family of her own. Already married to another attorney by the time Hillary met her, Edelman eventually had three sons.