Rather than label these women as passive victims of their husbands' foolish actions, we need to look at what the women expected to gain from their curious marriage bargains.
By Lisa Nuss
Written July 2011 -- The spring headlines veered from news of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s harem, to John Edwards’ cover-up of his affair and lovechild, to Anthony Weiner exposing his private parts to girls and women around the country. In all three cases, early public opinion was swayed by the fact that each man had secured a strong and smart woman by his side.
Midway through Congressman Weiner’s scandal, even as more tawdry photos leaked, Barbara Walters suggested that because his accomplished wife, Huma Abedin, was sticking by Weiner, so should voters. On The View, Walters suggested that if his impressive wife didn’t think it was a big deal, then neither should we. On what basis should we let her bad choices affect our good judgment? Most of us smelled a rat from the start, and if Huma, however beautiful and smart, chose to plug her nose – it’s less a statement about his character than hers.
Let’s not forget that on the eve of Schwarzenegger’s 2003 gubernatorial election, Maria Shriver publicly vouched for her husband’s integrity. After dozens of women from Arnold’s past came forward alleging his sexual groping habits, Maria helped him win by staking her credibility against Arnold’s accusers. Then Maria went back to the cozy home she shared with her husband and children, and the mother of his secret love child.
Being successful does not mean women necessarily make smart choices about men – in these three cases, it seems that the super smart are even more capable of self-delusion. It’s worth asking, in this day and age, why do smart women put up with cads?
A curious bargain
Plenty of successful women choose to remain independent, such as the bachelorly Edie Falco and Diane Keaton. Many alpha women who choose to marry, like Ann Curry and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, select easy-going beta males who seem fine letting their wives have the limelight. Women today have a lot of choices – whether to marry, when to marry, whom to marry. I grew up in the 1970s in a progressive family, in a lower-middle class neighborhood of egalitarian state workers and teachers. I thought the days of women coddling powerful men had been eradicated, like small pox.
Yet Maria Shriver, Elizabeth Edwards and Huma Abedin each made the deliberate choice to lend their good name and loyalty to ambitious men who wore their arrogance on their sleeves.
Don’t Threaten the Men
During a 2005 Vanity Fair interview, Maria Shriver offered an odd non sequitur about her upbringing. On a recent visit to her father, she recounted, he’d looked at her and said, “Those cheekbones! The way you talk about issues! But be careful, Maria, you could overwhelm men that you meet.’” His daughter had forged a career as a nationally respected journalist, yet her father still scolded her against threatening men. No wonder that woman is conflicted.
When I bootstrapped my way to a top law school in the 1990s, I was shocked to find dozens of women from Ivy League families who’d been raised with the same message: “Be all you can be, just don’t threaten the men.” Since my ancestors migrated over the Oregon Trail, I have no such heritage of women growing up with shame at their strength. You can’t worry about pretending to be dainty when you’re caulking the wagons to float down the Columbia River. The womenfolk worked right alongside the menfolk on the trail and once they settled to farm in the Willamette Valley.
I wrote my graduate thesis on the culture clash of values I encountered in the upper class world; I’ve since continued research into the anachronistic expectations that women defer to men. It comes down to notions of femininity. In her book Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives, psychologist Anna Fels observes that “[T]he mandate that females provide recognition to males is a basic requirement of the white, middle-class notion of femininity.”
Ambitious women who want acceptance in those status circles learn early to sublimate their drive and aggression and find ways to mask their real selves. My peers in law school -- in the mid 1990s-- had adopted soft voices, lilting tones, accommodating smiles – and a near universal code to never challenge a male’s opinion. They’d learned to turn “on” their faux-feminine persona the minute men were spotted within the vicinity.
Among the array of strategies to “prove” to others, and yourself, that you’re not really scary, is to find sanctuary on the arm of a powerful man. Writing in the 1970s, progressive thinker Germaine Greer observed that status marriages provide “approved buttresses” for women in our culture. Forty years later, New York Magazine called the updated version the “cocoon” of the powerful marriage.
Victims or Players?
New York Magazine is the only media outlet I’ve seen that countered the woman-as-victim narrative for today’s betrayed political wife. In a June article, Emily Nussbaum asked, “Is she his victim or his co-conspirator? A patsy, a partner, a pragmatist, or Lady Macbeth? Is she staying out of forgiveness or calculation?”
An element of calculation is obvious in the desperate attempts of both Shriver and Edwards to prop up images of their husbands as men of great integrity and devoted husbands. Both women kept up the charade until incontrovertible DNA evidence proved otherwise.
Elizabeth Edwards jumped the shark when she staged the sham renewal of their wedding vows. By all accounts, she’d flown into scary rages after learning of John’s flagrant infidelity, yet not long after, she cooed at him for a People Magazine cover during the primary election. Did she want the White House that badly, or could she simply not let go of her fictional ideal marriage?
“Jump the shark” comes from a later Happy Days episode when Fonzi water-ski jumps over a shark. The term refers to declining TV shows that grasp at absurd stunts and plots to prop up ratings. Maria Shriver jumped the shark in a 2005 Vanity Fair interview, when she claimed, “I have worked and worked on my marriage, and it has paid off. All of my friends say, ‘I want what you and Arnold have.’ It seems now that even Maria didn’t want what she and Arnold had.
Elephant in a Tutu
Boasting of an enviable marriage seems an odd move for any married person, since I’ve seen few marriages that are, in fact, enviable. Marriages are all flawed, as are all humans. The key to understanding the decisions of these women lies in viewing the fictional images that they put forward, not just of their husbands and marriages, but of themselves.
Along with the strange claim that everyone she knew wanted her marriage, Shriver posed for that 2005 Vanity Fair cover as the poster child for fictional femininity. There she is – playing the role of the dainty bejeweled damsel, scantily clad in flimsy pastels, demurely sitting side saddle behind her rough and strong man. He, in stark contrast, is fully dressed in power leather, steering their relationship and ready to straddle the world.
Shriver worked so hard to construct an image of herself opposite of her real personality, that one can’t help but infer a search for her father’s approval, and possibly her own. According to many interviews Shriver gave during this period, she was full of rage and spittle at being thrust into the supporting First Lady role. She told Vanity Fair how outraged she was that the Capitol staff asked her to pick out the Christmas ornaments.
In 2008, she gave a long, rambling interview to Oprah’s Magazine in which she vented resentment at giving up her powerful career to support Arnold. This is not a woman who is happy sitting in the back seat, yet there she is smiling happily on a national magainze, playing the socially-sanctioned backseat role of passive wife to the powerful man.
She could have insisted on continuing her journalism career, even after the network saw Arnold’s job as a conflict. Instead, she just gave it up. But she doesn’t acknowledge her choice. As she tells Vanity Fair, “My mother said, ‘You cannot hold him back. This is what I had to do for your father.’”
The same inner conflict can be seen in Elizabeth Edwards, may she rest in peace. By all accounts, she thirsted for the power of the White House more than John did, and spent most days on the campaign trail spurring and prodding everyone in sight. There’s nothing wrong with such ambitions; I harbor a few myself. Yet when the cameras turned on, Elizabeth morphed into the sweet, passive, adoring wife.
Who humiliated whom?
During the media frenzy over the Schwarzenegger lovechild, Kathie Lee Gifford -- who chose to stay in the cocoon of her own powerful marriage after her husband’s cadful cheating -- ran to Maria Shriver’s defense: “People say Maria has been humiliated, but that’s wrong. She didn’t do anything – Arnold humiliated himself.” I beg to differ.
For anyone living in California in 2003, as I did, who heard Maria ridicule the 16 women who detailed Arnold’s (alleged) decades-long pattern of grabbing at co-workers, her chance to escape humiliation has passed. Rather than face the character of the man she’d chosen to marry, she chose to become an accomplice.
To be fair to Shriver, much of the State of California shared her delusion. At the time, I worked for the Bay Area law firm that managed campaign contributions for Arnold’s afterschool initiative. Everyone, it seemed, was in thrall with this tough-acting movie star. The voting public had the same chance as Maria to do the right thing by the courageous women who told the (alleged) truth about Arnold, and instead they elected a man whose medieval attitudes about life and women follow him around like PigPen’s dust cloud.
It bears reminding that Gov. Schwarzenegger couldn’t be bothered to obey the state’s landmark ban on smoking in public places, so he constructed a giant cigar tent contraption outside his Capitol office in Sacramento. On an episode of The View, host Joy Behar made this comment about the news of Schwarzenegger’s second family: “What? Does he think he’s some kind of Arab sheik with a harem?” Interesting choice of words, since he flouted the public smoking ban by conducting the state’s business inside his “Bedouin-style” cigar tent, and then went home and flouted his marriage vows under his wife’s own roof.
Yes, the majority of voters in California share Shriver’s shame at bolstering Arnold’s behaviors. Over the next eight years, Shriver appeared to be exorcising that guilt. She engaged in activities so erratic it made me think of OJ Simpson’s bizarre trip in the white Bronco, searching for the real killer. After Shriver had essentially called Arnold’s accusers liars – many of whom risked their Hollywood careers by using their names -- she travelled around the state promoting her seminars on “Empowering Women.”
According to the website, the seminars taught women to be “architects of change” in their own lives. Hmmm. Her conundrum, of course, is that one cannot simultaneously enable male entitlement and empower women. That’s an unwinnable struggle and part of the high price paid for the sanctuary of the powerful man. If you indulge his swaggering over others, he’ll eventually swagger over you.
A Special Case for the Ticking Clock
Ms. Abedin has not yet spoken publicly about her husband’s pastime, or his week of emphatic lies about his pastime, or his refusal to admit that either of those things should cause him to resign. But in marrying him, we do know a few things about her.
Firstly, she wanted urgently to have a baby, setting a land speed record for getting pregnant at 35 within eight months of the marriage. I don’t call older women having babies “desperate” -- as I happily waited until I was 43 to have my first baby-- but when a wedding is packaged around the baby so snugly, it’s the wedding part that starts to look desperate.
There are few (I couldn’t think of any) high profile examples of young single mothers in the East Coast political status circles Huma runs in. However legitimate it is nowadays for women to have children while remaining independent, in Huma’s world, the only thing worse than marrying a non-status male is to not marry at all. Which brings me to the second thing we know about her.
She is an accomplished, educated woman who chose to marry a man often described as an “abrasive climber.” I’m not into abrasive men myself, but if that’s Huma’s thing, so be it. Notice, though, she did not choose an abrasive plumber or an abrasive organic farmer to father her child. She chose an abrasive national figure who was expected to become the Mayor of New York City (before he became a flasher).
Time will tell how Abedin reacts to the crumbling buttress of her status marriage. One minute, she was part of a power couple with an exciting baby bump, expecting soon to move into Gracie Mansion with her picture perfect family. The next, she’s just pregnant and hitched to a man revealed to be a lewd exhibitionist.
Unlike Shriver and Edwards, Abedin hasn’t been married long enough to become Weiner’s accomplice. In less than a year her fictional prince charming has blown his cover, and it’s too late to put lipstick on her pig. Will she walk away? The challenge is, in those same social circles, the stigma of divorce and becoming an independent woman can be worse than remaining married to your cad.
Most sad and ironic of all, is that much of the stigma is dished out by other women. Political scientist Cynthia Enloe posits that patriarchy endures because women agree to play along. While our culture privileges a certain image of masculinity, it needs “the complex notion of femininity and enough women’s acceptance or complicity to operate.”
Every decade brings new, confident predictions that women will finally share power – real, raw, direct power -- in our country. Yet instead of it getting better, it may be getting worse. In the late 2000s, I worked at a financial consulting firm with recent Princeton and Yale grads who courted powerful men more aggressively than ever. Gone was the conflict that riddled Shriver’s generation and my law school peers. The elite young women I worked with just a few years ago openly mocked equality and disrespected women who tried to wield power on their own. This will be good news to the young alpha males out there: a fresh mating pool looking for cads.
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