Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKSWho said politics and women don't mix? They do, and A Room at a Time by Jo Freeman explores the entrance of women into Republican and Democratic party politics, and Amanda Foreman's best-selling biography Georgiana looks back 200 years to a dazzling Duchess and her social set.
AND CONSIDER THIS
Before or after reading Georgiana, time-travel via video to
the Duchess's day with The Madness of King George; Great Dames
by Marie Brenner celebrates ten older women and the lessons to be learned
from them.
BOOKS:
A House Was Not Always Home
A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics by Jo Freeman (Rowman & Littlefield; 353 pages; $35)
Think of American politics as a big and somewhat unruly household, much
in need of women. Little by little, they politely knock at the door, finally
allowed in to do a little servant work of tidying up after the boys and
getting rid of all those liquor bottles and spittoons. Gradually they move
in a few things of their own and start to re-decorate. That's a useful
metaphor for the efforts by women over much of the 20th century to be equal
partners in America's political house, and in her new book Jo Freeman,
a veteran editor and writer on women and politics, uses it with intelligence
and grace.
There could not be a better time
than this presidential election year for Freeman's study on women's entrance
into party politics. During the quadrennial pursuit of the Oval Office,
Democrats and Republicans play fix-it with their identities, making subtle
changes in an odd kind of strategic and ideological mix-'n'-match. The
media thrusts the two parties before its flawed lens, peering at the tiny
surface fissures and ominous cracks that could be signs of future tectonic
shifts.
Republicans and Democrats weren't
always what they seem to be nowadays. John McCain doesn't seem like so
much of a maverick when it is pointed out, as Freeman does, that the G.O.P.
began as the party of reform and progress. As for the Democratic Party,
she writes, it "was composed of marginal peoples striving to become part
of American society, not to change it.'' Within the parties, Republican
women were better organized, and it wasn't so much that more women tended
to vote Republican but that more Republican women tended to vote. It is
this party alignment, with women toiling in local and national politics,
running for office and accepting appointments, that Freeman examines. She
ends her book just before the Big Switcheroo began in the '60s, when the
Democratic Party embraced feminist activists and the Republicans hugged
the anti-fem brigade.
The party woman was a different breed from
the suffragist. Her loyalty was not to a cause but to the organization.
She was good for the party, domesticating it and bringing it out of the
saloon and barber shop, but how good was the party for the woman? They
volunteered during campaign time and were tireless in canvassing for votes,
organizing rallies or passed out literature. Asked to help get men elected,
they were then seldom rewarded for their efforts. As a Denver woman early
in the century noted, "Women do the work and the men get the money and
position nine times out of ten.'' But if the male candidate was preening
in the spotlight, there was something else going on quietly behind the
scenes in national committees in the women's divisions established by both
parties. Whatever one may think of this gender separation, Freeman gives
credit where it is due, stressing the divisions' effectiveness in
educating and training women to be successful in politics.
The book traces the rise of women's influence in the voting
booth and on party platforms and also looks at how the female political
role grew more and more narrow over time. The emphasis for women delegates
to conventions throughout the '20s and '30s had been on issues involving
children and welfare. When the 1960s rolled around, women were more
likely to be on show as Smiling Wife. Eleanor Roosevelt was the first to
consider herself part of a political team with her husband, and her successors,
notably excluding Hillary Clinton, took on Mrs. R's outward role of political
partner but with little or no real influence on policy. Freeman sums it
up succinctly: "The message being conveyed to party women was that who
you married was more important than what you did.''
After all their loyalty, what share did
women have in their government? Eleanor Roosevelt was forceful in
getting appointments for women, as was Molly Dewson, the head of
the Democratic National Committee's women's division. Even with
backing from the inside, some barriers remained nearly insurmountable.
Freeman recounts the difficulties faced time and again by accomplished
and dedicated women. One example: Judge Florence Allen, a possible
Supreme Court candidate during the Truman Administration, was vetoed
by Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who seemed to feel the feminine presence
might detract from the way the guys managed the judicial process.
A woman, he maintained, might make it hard for the Justices to settle
back, take off their robes and perhaps their shoes and with shirt
collars unbuttoned, discuss their problems and come to decisions.
Despite obstacles, female appointments steadily progressed. The
only decline, Freeman notes, was, surprisingly, under John Kennedy,
and so by the time women's rights was part of the national debate,
"government feminists came out of the woodwork and acted as social
change agents from the inside.''
In summing up women's gifts to party politics, Freeman
gets it right. Their presence helped civilize what had been a fairly unseemly
process. Their appearance as poll watchers, for example, dampened the roistering
atmosphere of election day. With persistence, women entering party politics
made sure to push more and more doors open for the women who would be following
them. If what they did has largely been forgotten, it's because their historic
deeds had not adequately been acknowledged. Now they have.
BOOKS
Mirror of Her Time
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman
(Random House; 464 pages: $29.95)
What a life she led! Born into one aristocratic family and married into
another, admired for her arresting looks and lauded for her good mind and
political acumen, she was the star of her social world and set the fashion
of an era. She was smart and serious but gambled away a fortune and kept
it secret from her husband. A loving mother, she was an adulterous wife.
In short, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, has all the qualities
that usually make for a great best-selling biography. But she was a woman
of the 18th century, an era that to some readers would seem as remote and
interesting as the tundra. They wold be wrong. It was a juicy time, and
lets us in on the fun and games with her compelling and sympathetic account
of a fascinating woman.
Comparison between Georgiana and Princess
Diana, her great-great-great-great niece, are irresistible. Some 200 years
separate them, but the parallels astonish. They were both Spencers and
lived as girls in the ancestral home of Althorp, where Diana is buried.
They married young, not necessarily for love, and were expected to produce
an heir. They did, though it took Georgiana a great deal longer. Tall and
elegant beauties, each were arbiters of fashion and the focus of rapt attention
by journalists and the public. They took lovers while married, and both
were bulimic. After a crisis in their lives, they emerged from a dark night
to become strong individuals with an abiding sense of social purpose. A
letter Georgiana wrote her son in 1806 about her expectations for him could
echo Diana's wishes for Prince William. "I hope to live to see you not
only happy but the cause of happyness to others, expending your princely
fortune in doing good and employing the talents and powers of pleasing,
with which nature has gifted you.''
Georgiana had considerable powers of
pleasing and, like Diana was often lonely. She longed for attention, and
received it all her life, from both men and women. Never vain, she was
highly susceptible to manipulation. The most blatant conniver was Lady
Elizabeth Foster, or Bess, as she was known. Georgiana took her up as a
friend, and with the Duke, established a tight little company of three.
Even though she was disliked by Georgiana's children and mother almost
all the Spencers and had two illegitimate children by the Duke, the Duchess
staunchly protected Bess, her closest companion and, it is hinted, her
lover. Georgiana had a love-child of her own, fathered by the future Prime
Minister, Charles Grey. After Georgiana died, the Duke married her gal
pal Bess, who survived him to live in Italy and become the last lover
of a Roman Catholic Cardinal.
While relating the social intrigues
and romantic liaisons of the Devonshires and their social set, which
was known as the ton, Foreman adroitly describes the complicated
politics of Georgiana's day. George III was on the throne and not always
in good health. He had just lost his colonies in the New World, his son
the Prince of Wales was angling to become regent, and the relationship
between Parliament and the monarchy was in flux. Across the Channel, there
was revolution and regicide.
Georgiana was in the thick of
it all. The 18th century woman of wealth in England had far more latitude
in the political sphere than her descendants in Queen Victoria's day, or
even in our own. As an aristocrat with a great house in London, Georgiana
opened her doors to her Whig friends, advising and plotting with them and
emerging as a savvy hostess and persuasive campaigner who could out-rival
anyone in modern-day Washington, D.C. Asserts Foreman: "No
other woman -- indeed, very few men -- achieved as much influence as Georgiana
wielded during her lifetime.''
Had the Duchess been a cold and shallow creature,
a mean-spirited user, she would be of no more than passing historic interest.
Foreman combed through private collections of letters, notes and
diaries and period accounts to reveal a woman of warmth, fortitude and
unusual self-reflection. Biographers often fall head over heels in love
with their subject, and that seems the case here. Foreman has been
smitten by Georgiana, and her readers will happily be too.
Video:
The Madness of King George Directed by Nicholas Hytner
The 1995 film, with a brilliant and moving performance by British actor Nigel Hawthorne as the English king, illuminates the tangled intrigues and influences during the Duchess of Devonshire's time and makes a perfect companion piece to Georgiana. What with a plot to supplant the ruler with his foppish son and opposition schemes for parliamentary reform, the politics of Georgiana's time were as heated as anything during the un-impeachment of last year and just as cynical.
Books:
Great Dames by Marie Brenner
(Crown; 242 pages; $22; )
A writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, Marie Brenner subtitles her book of essays What I Learned from Older Women, and these ten terrific dames certainly have a lot of lessons to teach us all. Some gained fame through intellectual, artistic, philanthropic or political means, or became an icon because of their sheer flamboyance or the mystery of personality. Several married well. In these short pieces about Constance Baker Motley, Luise Rainer, Jacqueline Onassis, et al., Brenner creates something akin to instant, colorful snapshots. The best in the album is the one on Thelma Brenner, the writer's mother, and the sometimes close, sometimes antagonistic relationship between the two. The connection runs deep and unending. "I couldn't escape her if I wanted to,'' the daughter writes, years after her mother's death. "I carry her with me every day.''
