Free Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins Page B

has the smarts and the drive to do things like that—to become one of the best lawyers in the country or, if she chose, to be as formidable a political candidate as any of the women the Democrats have so proudly featured at the podium—she’s considered a menace to her husband’s campaign. His image guys (note: guys) want her to stay home and knit tea cozies lest the Great American Public take alarm.
    Personally, I don’t think any of this has anything to do with Hillary Clinton, who seems just as nice as she can be (I base this on all of two encounters with her) and has specialized in the area of law that helps children. It does, however, say a great deal about the ambivalence and confusion in this country over the changing roles of women. Wicked Women are a running theme in our culture, from the femme fatale of the nineteenth century to the castrating bitch favored in current films about career women who don’t have enough sense to give it all up for a chance at marriage and motherhood. The Republican attack machine, a formidable instrument, stands ready to paint Hillary Clinton as someone akin to the Glenn Close character in
Fatal Attraction,
some ambition-crazed female without an ounce of natural warmth.
    Women receive so many conflicting messages these days about how to behave and what is expected of us—sugar and spice, ruffles and lace, white gloves and gentility, stand by your man and good old mom (as long as she’s not on welfare) get all mixed up with independence, holding a job, respect, achievement, and having a brain as well as a figure. Ellen Chesler’s new biography of Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate and early exemplar of emancipated womanhood, reminds us of how long we’ve all been struggling with these same contradictions. Frankly, if women didn’t have a strong sense of humor, I think we’d all be nuts by now.
    What interests me about the mass media’s treatment of the recurrent conflicts caused by this mad mix of messages is their practically prurient interest in seeing women fight. “Catfight,” “hair pulling,” and “mud wrestling” are the beloved clichés of those who like to promote events where “the girls go at it.” Setting women up to attack one another and then reporting on the ensuing festivities is a favorite media ploy and has been ever since the press tried to make nonexistent bra-burnings the equivalent of feminism in the 1960s.
    Meanwhile, the convention’s social scene is roaring along but may not again match the awesome display of New York power and glitter that turned out to meet Ann Richards at the Russian Tea Room Tuesday night. Richards, like most people in politics, is used to the politically prominent and long past being thrilled at meeting someone with a political title. But the crowd invited by gossip columnist and New York Texan Liz Smith (of Fort Worth, of course) was a mix of creative talent and media clout that left the press agape. Jane Pauley of television and her husband, Garry Trudeau, who does the “Doonesbury” strip,
Vanity Fair
editor Tina Brown and her husband, Harry Evans, of Random House, lyricist Adolph Greene,
New York Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger, writers Peter Maas and Norman Mailer, Roone Arledge of ABC, on and on it went. Ann Richards may be governor of Texas, but she’s still from Waco: She said later, “Can you believe they came to meet ME? I looked around that room and I felt like a stump.”
    Trudeau, by the way, is a fan of Texas comptroller John Sharp, who picked up on a Trudeau strip urging people who want to escape paying state income taxes to become titular Texans, à la George Bush. Sharp issued honorary Texan certificates to the thousands of “Doonesbury” fans and tax-dodgers who responded to the joke—and made money for the state doing it.
     
    July 1992

 
    The Voters Speak
     

     
    A LITTLE-KNOWN FACT about political writers, especially this one, is that if it weren’t for the readers, we would go