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The President's wife, as Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, was to be seen and not heard, a discreet adornment to her husband's glory. Never mind that Mrs. Roosevelt broke most of her own rules with her high-profile tours and a vocal interest in civil rights. Most of those who followed in her footsteps remained true to the traditional backseat role, and those who ventured too close to the policymaking arena -- Rosalynn Carter sitting at the Cabinet table, for instance -- were harshly criticized. And there are some sound reasons for concern. The President's spouse is potentially the second most powerful person in government but is beyond accountability. Yet for reasons that are both social and generational, Barbara Bush will almost certainly be the last of the traditional First Ladies. Whoever follows her is likely to shatter the mold -- particularly if it is a woman with the professional achievements, the career ambitions and the activist bent of Hillary Clinton.
Still, Mrs. Clinton would have done well at the outset to have conformed more to the traditional campaign rules for aspiring First Ladies: gaze like Nancy Reagan, soothe like Barbara Bush and look like Jacqueline Kennedy. By not doing that, to some extent, Hillary played into the hands of her critics. At first she seemed insufficiently aware that she was not the candidate herself. Instead of standing by like a potted palm, she enjoyed talking at length about problems and policies. At one coffee in a living room in Manchester, New Hampshire, people were chatting amiably about the cost of groceries when she abruptly launched into a treatise on infant mortality. She sometimes took longer to introduce her husband than he did to deliver his speech. She, and he, should have known that quips like "People call us two- for-one" would arouse the traditionalists.
Her image as a tough career woman probably peaked in March, when Democratic gadfly Jerry Brown charged that her law firm benefited unfairly from her marriage to the Arkansas Governor. After she shot back, "I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas," many minds snapped shut on the Hillary question faster than you can say sound bite. (Almost no one reported the rest of what she said: "The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed . . . to assure that women can make the choices . . . whether it's full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination.")
Ironically, Hillary's natural desire to shield her daughter from the glare of publicity only fed suspicions that she valued the role of high-powered lawyer over that of wife and mother. Instead of using Chelsea in photo ops in New Hampshire, where a sweet family portrait might have helped counter the Gennifer Flowers story, Hillary kept her daughter back in Little Rock with her grandparents. To this day, Chelsea has never been interviewed and is still only rarely photographed.