TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050790/0507105.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 113 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 35

What's Love Got to Do with It?


Wellesley's unease over wife and mother Barbara Bush renews the
debate about women's divided loyalties

By MARGARET CARLSON -- With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Boston


    How can women pick on Barbara Bush? If anything, the
feminist police should give her an award for resisting pressure
from every side to slim down, work out, dye her hair, hide her
wrinkles or wear clothes no grandchild would dare drool on.
Instead the First Lady must be feeling a little like Henry
Kissinger, who attracted protests nearly every time he was
invited to a college campus. But it's not the secret bombing of
Cambodia that has a quarter of the senior class at Wellesley
College objecting to the First Lady as speaker at this year's
graduation. It is simply that she is married to George Bush and
has no career of her own. "To honor Barbara Bush as a
commencement speaker is to honor a woman who has gained
recognition through the achievements of her husband, which
contradicts what we have been taught over the past four years,"
the students wrote in their petition.

    Being First Lady may be an automatic disqualification at an
all-women's college where graduates aspire to be President, not a
President's wife; to run the country, not the house; and where
previous speakers have included Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem
and Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich. Barbara Bush wasn't
Wellesley's first choice this year; that honor went to Alice
Walker, black author, single mother and Pulitzer prizewinner,
who declined. To women in cap and gown who have worked hard to
be able to make it on their own, having a wife and mother on the
podium may feel too diminishing, like getting on Nightline and
then having to wave to your mom.

    What the protest over Bush really displays is not
disrespect but uncertainty. Women, after all, have always known
they could be mothers. It is the opportunity to have
full-strength, male-like careers that is relatively new and,
therefore, tenuous. What makes it frightening is the assumption
that they can play both roles well. Bush has acknowledged that
being a woman was easier in her day. In a speech last year at
Smith -- the school she dropped out of in 1944 at 19 to marry
George Bush -- she told the students, "You have so many options
that it must be difficult . . . women are often expected --
especially by themselves -- to be all things to all people, and
to be perfect in every role."

    Therein lies the rub. Women know that the hard-won choice to
work has somehow turned into an imperative to do so, but without
the support at home that makes it feasible. The professional
classes paper over the shortfall by hiring a small army of
parental surrogates, by accepting a reduced idea of the
emotional needs of family life, and by lobbying for flextime and
expanded day care. But no act of Congress will ever allow a
parent to be in two places at once.

    Despite two decades of feminist victories, only women seem
to feel the emotional schizophrenia that comes with having
children. The fact that "working father" and "daddy track" have
not worked their way into the language is instructive, if not
disconcerting. So is the survey that shows that wives put in an
extra month of work at home each year, time their male
counterparts can spend at their desks or, unfairer still,
sleeping. If a woman has a fulfilling career, she still yearns
for more time with her child. If she stays home, she is bound to
wish for some of the excitement and perks that come with a job.

    On commencement day, few college graduates want to be
reminded of the dilemma; at 22, motherhood is easy to devalue.
The rush that comes from closing a million-dollar deal, getting
the corner office or winning collegial respect has an immediate
appeal that mountains of diapers and twelve years of PTA do not.
Not just men or the marketplace but the sisterhood as well came
to believe that the only jobs worth pursuing are paid and the
only accomplishments worth having are ones that enhance a
resume. In last winter's alumni magazine, Wellesley graduate
Mary Morrow wrote about how her classmates responded to her
decision to combine college with motherhood with "bewilderment
and occasional pity."

    Bush may be the perfect antidote to this culture, which
economist Sylvia Hewlett, author of A Lesser Life, says has
"taught young women to almost despise the nurturing role."
Indeed, now that Bush is on her own, she is holding her own.
Rather than hype fashion designers or choose new White House
china (she is replacing chipped plates one at a time), Bush
spends her days drawing attention to the homeless, AIDS
patients, the poor, and those whose lives have been so
impoverished they never learned to read. For Wellesley students,
says Hewlett, Bush "has all sorts of wisdom about what half of
their lives will be" -- of the victories of motherhood, small
and evanescent, which occur largely behind closed doors with
results apparent in the next decade, not the next deal. It is
a profession in which almost nothing happens day by day but
everything is won or lost over time. Important stuff for these
women who, if they are lucky, will graduate to more than a
paycheck.