Fed Up by Gemma Hartley

Author:Gemma Hartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Too Emotional to Lead?

During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid, focus turned time and again to one issue that plagued the American people and his opponents alike: his wife. Hillary Clinton was a career woman long before she met Bill, and instead of letting her work fade into the background as he entered public service, she continued full steam ahead at her law firm, rejecting the ceremonial role of first lady in favor of professional fulfillment. After one particularly frustrating debate, in which Governor Jerry Brown spent most of his time accusing Bill of funneling favorable accounts to Hillary’s firm, she punched back. She was fed up.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”1

The context didn’t matter; it was the wrong answer. Hillary spent weeks trying to undo the damage, explain her position, drive home the fact that she respected stay-at-home mothers. Still letters from angry Americans poured into Time magazine, including one from New Jersey voter June Connerton that read, “If I ever entertained the idea of voting for Bill Clinton, the smug bitchiness of his wife’s comment has nipped that notion in the bud.”2 The lengths to which Hillary finally went to squelch the public outcry? She agreed to a presidential first lady bake-off against Barbara Bush to be published in the pages of Family Circle. Her chocolate chip oatmeal cookies won the bake-off, and Bill won the presidency, but her comment would never be forgotten.

The infamous quote would follow Hillary Clinton for years, long after her husband’s 1992 presidential bid and into her own candidacy in 2016, when her cookie recipe would once again grace the pages of Family Circle in the now-traditional bake-off, as it did all those years ago (this time titled the “Clinton family recipe,” as there stood to be no first lady). Her career, now decades long, and furthermore her personality still worried the American conscience. She was too ambitious, too unapologetic. Her determination to live life on her own terms made a lot of people deeply uncomfortable. The emotional labor she put in to assuage that discomfort was never, and would never be, enough.

Politics has always been a tricky arena for women, who must overcome the stereotypes of being unfit to lead because of their gender while simultaneously having to put much of their femininity into overdrive to keep their constituents comfortable and happy. Making one’s way into elected office is, in many ways, a popularity contest. You cannot ignore likability in favor of policy, especially as a woman in what is still by and large a man’s world. The higher women rise in leadership, the more emotional labor is demanded of them. By the time you get to the very top, as Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 election, those demands are near impossibly high. At that point you must pick and choose how to perform emotional labor to put yourself in the best possible position.

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