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Some wives turn out to be a political match for their husbands. Jane Hart, who holds a helicopter pilot's license, is often a provocative step ahead of her husband, Michigan Senator Philip Hart. She refused to pay her 1972 federal income tax because of the Viet Nam War and journeyed on her own to Hanoi to talk to American P.O.W.s. Hart, who candidly admits that his wife financed his political career, quips, "Bedfellows make strange politics." Carolyn Bond, wife of Missouri's Democratic Governor Kit Bond, relishes campaigning as much as her husband. She has visited every state hospital in Missouri and is considering running for office herself some day.
Full Disclosure. Where does the American political wife go from here? Will increasing TV and press coverage make politicians more open and honest —on the job and at home as well—or simply more cautious? It is difficult to see how, in the present climate, Franklin Roosevelt could have kept his affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd secret for so many years. The growing concern with candor, the insistence on full disclosure, would seem to discourage the long-accepted hypocrisies—the tendency, as one observer puts it, "to be the gingham-checked girl back in the state and the most sophisticated, intelligent, glamorous female in Washington." The capital, in fact, is blessed with what seems to be the most frank and outspoken First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, and the atmosphere may be catching. In Colorado, Lee Hart notes that when she campaigns for her husband Gary in the gubernatorial race, "people care about issues. I am never asked about clothes and recipes." In Pennsylvania, Claire Schweiker, wife of the Republican Senator, contends that "wives are expected to be seen and heard now, instead of seen and not heard as they used to be."
Political wives are agitating for something more than politics as usual. For them a career of scrambling for office and then struggling to stay there is not enough. The rebellion of the political wife—and her passive protest of divorce, alcoholism and withdrawal—is a plea not just for women but also for a more humane politics.