The First Lady Is Our Queen

ALL OF A SUDDEN, a couple of weeks ago as the Dean campaign lay on the table in ER gasping for life, they decided to reinvent the independent Dr. Steinberg of Burlington, Vermont as Judy Dean in primary colors and TV makeup. But when the nation crowded around to take a look, it turned out that it was the feminist narrative that lay on the operating table gasping for life.

But not to worry. The Rapid Reaction Task Force jumped into action, and last weekend the elite newspapers were full of helpful features on candidate wifery: “Running Mates” in The Wall Street Journal assured us that the presidential candidate wives were all interesting, vigorous, modern women who brought a range of talent to their husbands’ campaigns, and “Better Halves” in The New York Times assured us that candidate wives were complementary, the yin to their husband’s yang.

No doubt political wives are a tremendous resource. But modern womanhood and feminism have nothing to do with the symbols of political rule and the rites of campaigning. When we elect a modern president, we are enthroning our King. And the president’s wife is our Queen. Fight that truth at your peril

What should a queen be like? She should be the embodiment of the American Dream, graceful and determined, a prop to her noble husband and a source of inspiration to American womanhood. She should be an angel of mercy, a comfort to all who are heavy laden. That is why Hillary Clinton as First Lady went down like a lead balloon until she got a makeover and started acting the part.

You can see why the feminist War Room had to act. The modern woman is supposed to have her own life, no longer a decorous accessory to an organization-man-father-knows-best husband. The Dean fiasco threatened to turn back the clock on decades of progress.

But it won’t work. It won’t work because women in the modern world are just like men. Freed from the bone-wearying labor of outside work that barely put food on the family table, they now have options, just like men. In case you didn’t know, “having options” is short for “having the power to screw up your life, big time.” Just like men do.

When Betty Friedan announced that bored housewives like her were going quietly mad out in the boring suburbs she was neither bored, nor suburban, nor a housewife. Instead, she was a veteran left-wing Manhattan journalist opening her own personal front in the left’s War on the Middle Class.

Friedan offered up a special version of the left’s narrative of oppression and liberation. She offered liberation to her oppressed believers by representing that the travail of woman’s life arose not out of the desperate struggle for survival and the risky scheme of sexual reproduction but out of the meanness of men who took all the good jobs for themselves and left women to do the dishes.

Of course, the all-powerful patriarchy soon put a stop to all that. It gave feminists everything they wanted. Birth control? Got it. Take lovers? Be my guest. Abortion? Penumbrated in the constitution. Divorce? Certainly. Real careers? You go girl. Men will do just about anything for the sake of domestic peace.

It was great. The lefties got a generation of women as foot soldiers for their War on the Middle Class, and the Democrats got the votes of single women.

But now the casualties are streaming back from the front. There are the millions of pretty girls who have never known what it is like to be courted, for their mating dance is the hook-up. There are the 45 million mothers mourning their 45 million aborted babies. There are the millions of women who have found out that “sexually active” means symptom-free clamydia and sterility. There are the millions of working moms who feel they have to work but would rather be home with their babies. There are the pro-life teenagers marching for their absent brothers and sisters.

It is beginning to look as though Dr. Freud (who treated the “hysteria” of the first generation of modern women) was right. You can’t repress the unconscious without descending into neurosis. A woman is a woman, whatever the zeitgeist tells her or whatever she tells herself.

The feminists can spin us from their elite broadsheets all they want, but they are still wrong. The president is our King, the symbol of our strength and power, and the First Lady is our national Queen, the symbol of life and maternal compassion. “Dr. Judy Steinberg” doesn’t cut it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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