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COLUMNIST
ELAYNE RAPPING
The Hillary
Thing
Norma McCorvey played a key role
on the historical stage.
n a review of the autobiography of
Norma McCorvey—the Jane Roe
of Roe v. Wade—in a recent issue of
Tiie New York Times Book Review,
novelist Susan Cheever bemoaned
the feminist community's misfortune at having so
faulty a heroine for so important a historic role.
What were McCorvey s failings in Cheever s view
One could only assume that her status as a working-class
lesbian with a rather rough and tumble—
but all too common—background of odd jobs,
hard knocks, and unfortunate encounters with
questionable men rendered her unacceptable as a
"feminist role model." She wasn't even a self-proclaimed
feminist at the time. She was simply someone
who needed an abortion and was willing to
go to court, to the Supreme
Court if necessary, to demand
the right to have one.
It seemed pretty heroic to
me, especially in light of
McCorvey's less privileged
status. But I'm clearly no
judge of what a feminist role
model is supposed to be these
days. I don't even get "the
Hillary thing." To most people—and
after reading Cheever's
review I suspect she is one
of them—it is Hillary Clinton
who seems most clearly to
embody the qualities required
to bear the mantle of feminist
virtue and honor in the public
eye these days. And there is no
doubt about it; Clinton is as
different from McCorvey as
one could be, and still end up on a common stage
at a common moment in history. Where McCorvey
is poor and uneducated—she now works as a
domestic—Clinton is a product of white suburbia
and the finest colleges and universities in the land.
Where McCorvey made all the wrong moves in
her personal life, finding herself, often as not,
caught in chaotic, even dangerous messes, Clinton's
life path has been almost magically on target; if
one's goal has been (and Clinton's surely was) to
reach the limits of worldly success and status possible
for a woman in a "post-feminist" age. She married
well and stayed that way through thick and
thin, even taking her husband's name to ensure his
political success. She used her Yale law degree to
make oodles of money and powerful friends and
contacts in the most prestigious corporate law firm
in Arkansas, the better to supplement her husband's
meager (by middle-class standards, if not those of a
domestic worker) government salary. She learned
to dress, coif, and comport herself to fit the changing
fashions of the day, and her rising income and
station in life (again, increasingly beyond the
dreams or means of domestic workers). She even
gave up, early on, her feisty "I'm not some little
woman standing by her man" persona in favor of
cookie recipes, public tears at Fourth of July fireworks
displays, and public baby cuddlings, all of
which contributed to her rise to power and influence
in national politics, and prominent spot on
the current roster of "feminist heroines." And it
all paid off, it seems. For here she is, one of the
most powerful, influential, famous, and even
glamorous (to be featured in a Vogue photo
spread, adorned in the highest of high couture, is
surely as glamorous as it gets for corporate attorneys)
women in the world.
And more power to her, as the very fitting
phrase would have it. Why shouldn't a smart,
tough, ambitious woman be sitting in the White
House, making policy, lecturing Congress, heading
up a national task force on one of the most crucial
issues of our day, and—best of all—making an
awful lot of men, from the Hill on down to the
gutter, very nervous and cranky about it all And
why shouldn't she also—as People magazine and
Linda Bloodworth-Thomason assure us she
does—maintain the kind of egalitarian marriage so
many women aspire to, in which both partners—
even the one who's male and the president of the
United States for heaven's sake—respect, support,
and nurture each other in perfect balance while
also sharing in the (apparently) equally successful
rearing of an amazingly (given the circumstances
of her life) normal, well-balanced, even athletic
teenage daughter. Who wouldn't be impressed
Who, as a feminist, wouldn't feel pride and hope in
so exemplary an image of the "Yes You Can Have
It All" New Woman
So why am I increasingly uncomfortable, even
irritated, at the very mention of Hillary Clinton
these days Why does the sight of that tight jaw
ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995