In 1994 I spent three weeks travelling the length and breadth of America,
researching the background of Hillary Clinton for a journalistic assignment.
The journey took me from the sophisticated East Coast honeyed walls of Yale
and Wellesley, where she was at college, right down south to Fayetteville,
Arkansas, where she and Bill, early in their married life, had worked as
university lecturers.
That she made that journey at all is to me quite astonishing. Downtown
Fayetteville then (and I doubt it’s much changed now) consisted of two
streets. I checked into a hotel at around 8pm, ordered room service and went
to sleep. By the next morning the whole town knew that a journalist from
London had arrived. The phone rang. It was the local newspaper editor.
“Heard you were here,” he drawled. “If you’ve come to talk about the
Clintons, I know them a little. Wondered if you’d like to have dinner with
me tonight?”
Dinner was at 5pm. Its purpose, I think, was to warn me off from being too
nosy but all I can remember now is a sense of overwhelming disbelief that
the woman whose distinguished academic career I’d just been charting in two
of the world’s most prestigious colleges could have willingly come to a
place such as this.
It’s 15 years since Bill Clinton became President of the United States (before
his spotlight-loving transatlantic friend Prime Minister Blair, even) which
for many of us seems like a lifetime ago. So it is easy to forget just how
many Americans and Britons distrusted the new President and, in particular,
his wife, Hillary. And when I say distrust I really mean, dislike.
The list of what they didn’t like about Hillary was long. They didn’t like the
way she used her surname, Rodham. In fact, they blamed Clinton’s first
electoral loss, when he ran for reelection as Governor in Arkansas, on his
wife’s failure to adopt her husband’s surname. Then they didn’t like the way
she compromised, calling herself Hillary Rodham Clinton. And then there was
her hair – not groomed enough; her clothes – not feminine enough; and her
manner – too clever and way, way too bossy. All in all, this was a woman who
was deeply threatening. Who the hell did she think she was?
Most stories about the President and the White House featured a Hillary horror
story on the side. The woman was a monster; the power behind the throne,
with political ideas way above her station. The relief when her proposed
health reforms fell by the wayside was palpable. Meanwhile, the stories
about her appalling behaviour were legion: she abhorred smoking, banning
even Clinton’s chain-smoking mother from lighting up in the White House; she
stopped Bill eating pizza or burgers and called in a heart specialist who
favoured a low-fat, vegetarian regimen to tell the White House chef how to
cook healthier meals.
In short, the woman was a ball-breaker. When Clinton’s womanising came to
light, the subtext was clear: the man was only human and deprived of pizza,
legitimate cigars and who knew what else by his wife, well, what’s a guy to
do?
Well, times change. Or do they? For now we have Hillary Clinton, all hints of
Rodham abandoned, battling it out for the Democratic presidential nomination
against Barack Obama, a 60-year-old white woman against a 46-year-old black
man . . . and it is the fact that the woman is winning that is considered to
be against the odds.
When I made my trip to Fayetteville I was just married. Since then I have had
two children, the eldest of whom is now old enough to begin considering what
career she herself might want to pursue. And what strikes me is that women
are really not much farther on.
Yes, we can use our maiden names without being considered uppity and no, it is
not acceptable to fire a woman because she is pregnant. But other than that
it seems to me that men still largely rule the world, that there is still
very much a glass ceiling, and that women who make it to the top – Margaret
Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice – often fit some male fantasy along the lines of
strict-but-sexy. Indeed, one of Hillary’s problems is that now she has cast
off her ball-breaker image (and let’s be clear about this, she didn’t cry –
she merely hovered on the brink, in response to a sympathetic question from
another woman along the lines of, how do you do it?) they’re not sure she’s
sexy at all. And who wants to be bossed around by a non-sexy woman? You may
not have a choice at work – but an election’s a different matter.
Meanwhile, a handful of women continue to fight the fight – blindly, and, it has to be said, unsuccessfully. Harriet Harman is the latest, with a
proposal that men should spend as long looking after their children as
women. I’m afraid I laughed out loud when I read this: it all sounds
terribly noble but the blunt fact is that most fathers don’t want to spend
an equal amount of time looking after their children – and most mothers
don’t want them to.
And so we have stasis. If the public are to trust women, there need to be more
of them in higher positions. For that to happen, their lives need to be made
more flexible. That can be achieved only with the help of men, who are still
pretty much in charge. But it probably won’t happen, because this stasis
suits most men very well: they will continue to be “stuck in the office” at
bathtime and bedtime. Women will continue to endeavour to be home.
I note that despite Barack Obama’s much vaunted appetite for change, his wife
has given up her $275,000-a-year job as vice-president of community and
external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospital to focus on his
presidential campaign.
If Hillary wins, it would be good to think that the first female US president
will represent a giant step forward for womankind. But I suspect that
instead, we will be told that a woman has won because of her husband.
Those doors just keep closing on us
Wimmin, part two. Yesterday morning I got up at 6.30am, put some washing on,
fed the cats, remade most of the beds because friends and their children
were coming to stay, chivvied the children along for school, made pancakes,
took the youngest to school, came home and fed the rabbits (having
remembered that the children had forgotten) and set off for work, arriving
at the Tube station just before 9am.
Hearing a train coming in, I raced up the stairs and thrust my arm in to stop
the door closing. Nothing happened. The door remained on my arm. Two men who
had run up the stairs behind me stared in disbelief and shouted to the
driver to open the doors. He would not. “Hang on in there,” they instructed.
By now there were a few more people on the platform. I hung on for a couple of
minutes but it was clear that he was not going to open the doors and in the
end I gave up. “Good try, my dear,” said the 60-ish man next to me. “But I
think you’ll find the moral here is that women are not supposed to run for
trains and succeed . . .”
Maddie the movie: what would you do?
I see the vilification that is never far from poor Kate and Gerry McCann has
resurfaced at the news that they have had talks about the possibility of a
film being made about their missing daughter.
Their aim, were it to go ahead, would simply be to raise more money to
continue the search. To their critics I put this question: if it were your
child missing, could you seriously say, well, never mind that we’ve run out
of money, we’ll just grieve quietly and stop the search, she’s probably dead
anyway?
