A woman’s choice

Governor Spitzer’s wife did the now standard thing and stood loyally by her man as he copped to $5,000 dates with paid floozies, and that’s her decision. But I wonder what people would say if she had had a different reaction.

What if Silda Wall Spitzer had said, Oh great! I’m supposed to go out there while 100 million men check me out and ask themselves why my husband preferred paying for 22-year-old snatch? No thanks, Eliot! You got yourself into this, and my three adult daughters and I aren’t sharing the klieg lights with you.

Would women cheer her as a true feminist, or would they say she wasn’t sticking with her husband through thick and thin?

I wonder about this because of the contradictory messages that the Clinton women accept as they cling to her rickety campaign bus. On the one hand, they insist that Hillary is a ‘strong woman’ (reminiscent of the George ‘Strong Man’ Bush of 2000), just the kind we need to occupy the White House during wartime.

At the same time, she attracts their sympathy because she went through all that humiliating public airing of what should be everybody’s personal business—what goes on in their bedrooms.

Mrs Clinton not only stuck it out but brought Mr Clinton back to help her slug it out on the campaign trail as if nothing important had happened. So is she now a victim or a ‘strong woman’? Is she a gritty survivor or a long-suffering wife? Does she get credit for independence and autonomy, or did she do the traditional thing and take the crap in exchange for the substantial benefits?

I can think of quite a few women who, after hearing on television about how their husband moistened his cigars in his intern’s panties, would have gone for long walk with him: I walk to the right, and my husband walks to the left. Hillary chose not to do that even though she certainly could have had her career without parading him around constantly and probably done just as well, even better. The fact that she chose to run with the team despite that treatment strikes me as understandable but hardly a show of ground-breaking feminism.

Politicians tend to talk as though they both support and oppose every important issue, and that’s how they keep everyone happy enough to get their votes. But life doesn’t work that way. Women have more choices today, but making a choice means you have to give up the alternatives. I don’t presume to judge hers, but we can’t have it both ways, and neither can she.