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Some women, to be sure, would be unhappy no matter what their husbands' occupations and would turn in their despair to drink, to drugs, to affairs. But probably no other career makes such relentless demands on wives and families as politics. Witness Pat Nixon in virtual exile at San Clemente. "We are worried about Pat," an associate of the Nixons confides. "She has not been in touch with any of her close friends. It's not like her." Witness Eleanor McGovern, once again on the stump in South Dakota, confessing with her customary candor: "I would like to have had another year before campaigning."
Marriage to a high-level corporate executive, educator or military officer has similar strains—but not really comparable. Those pressures can be worked out in relative privacy and obscurity. Not so with the officeholder's wife. She becomes public property, an extension of the public man, subject to unending scrutiny, judgments, accolades and criticism. She is often used and then abandoned or ignored or forced to turn the other way as "power groupies" cluster around the Big Man. She must sparkle to help her husband but beware of outshining him. She must know the issues and the arguments for and against. She must often maintain two homes without really living in either. Many such women want out. And yet, for all the pressures and drawbacks, quite a few would have it no other way, particularly after their husbands reach the real heights.
Almost all resent the near-total loss of privacy. Ellen Proxmire, former wife of Wisconsin's Democratic Senator William Proxmire, characterizes the experience in a book about her life in politics, One Foot in Washington. "I sometimes think that goldfish in a bowl are much better off than the public figures they resemble," she writes. "Those who study their silky movements from outside the glass don't criticize what they are wearing, what they do, what they say, what they mean, nor do they ask the fish lots of questions or expect them to do much more than entertain."
While many wives prefer to remain in the bowl, an increasing number are openly expressing discontent and looking for means to change the system that ensnares them in a variety of ways. Some, like Abigail McCarthy or Mieke Tunney or Phyllis Dole, have left their husbands and named politics as the corespondent. Others, like Betty Ford and Joan Kennedy, have sought psychiatric help and owned up to it — something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Occasionally there appears a Cornelia Wallace or a Martha Mitchell who does not hesitate to speak her own mind whatever her husband may think.
A political wife, in a sense, is a contradiction in terms. She is expected to manage a household and raise a family, often with little or no help from her hus band; yet, at the same time she is called upon to make speeches and win votes for her husband. She must be the model of purity and probity at home, but she must be Everywoman outside, with a ready smile and a cheerful word for all the importuning bores on the campaign trail. Writes Ellen Proxmire: "She is first and always a mother, a cook, a chauffeur, a seamstress and a homemaker, but she is also an adviser, a social secretary, a campaigner and even a TV personality."