The Silda Spitzer Lesson: Don’t Quit Your Day Job

The Silda Spitzer Lesson: Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Expert Guest Post by Linda Hirshman
First Published at Slate.com

Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images

Wife again standing mutely at his side, Eliot Spitzer resigned from his office
as governor of the state of New York. When Spitzer’s wife, Silda, called Hillary
Clinton for advice on how to be a good first lady a few years ago, she probably
didn’t realize how horribly relevant the connection would be. Now, another blond
deer caught in the headlights standing by her man rotates endlessly on our TV
screens while pundits like Dr. Laura debate whether she was good enough in bed
and saner voices implore the public not to blame the victim.

Everyone is asking what he could have been thinking: Gary Hart, Bill Clinton,
Newt Gingrich, David Vitter, all caught, all paying a price—many a very
high price. The guy had a perfect law school test score. Don’t they teach reasoning
by analogy at Harvard Law School? But why not ask the same question about her?
She went to Harvard, too. Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first Mrs.
Gingrich on her hospital bed. Spitzer could not have been ignorant of the history
of alpha-male politicians; she called Hillary herself. What could she have done?
What can any woman do?

How about this: Don’t quit your day job.

Silda Wall Spitzer was the poster child of the “opt-out revolution.”
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, she was one of the highest-billing
associates at the incredibly successful mergers and acquisitions law firm Skadden,
Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Later, she went to the office of the general
counsel of Chase Bank. But sometime in the 1990s, like many of the other women
of her class, she decided to “opt out,” to quit her job, in her words,
as her husband began his electoral career to devote herself to raising their
three daughters and to her philanthropies She helped start the Children to Children
Foundation, which teaches rich children social responsibility for the poor.

It all looked so perfect—the beautiful, beautifully educated blond Upper
East Side mom teaching the rich children at their private schools to share the
lavish sums normally spent on their birthday parties instead of her working
all night in the Skadden, Arps conference room doing deals. The exquisitely
mannered Southern WASP smoothing the rough edges of her less refined husband
(whose table manners were the subject of negative commentary in her New York
Times profile a year or so ago) instead of counseling the Chase in how to sell
more variable mortgages. Who wouldn’t envy her the privilege, wealth, insulation
from harsh competition and proxy power of her high-flying husband’s position?
Real Housewives of New York City, indeed.

What happened? Like all revolutionaries, the opt-out revolutionaries often
wind up bleeding on the barricades. Sure, all marriages don’t end in the arms
of an international prostitution ring. Indeed, in the Spitzers’ social class,
the divorce rate is far from the 50 percent we so often read about. However,
the rate of divorce, prostitution, online pornography, and the rest isn’t negligible,
either. And even if the marriage does not break up, women’s decisions to make
their social position completely dependent on the ambition, discipline, judgment,
and steadiness of another human being is not only an act of extreme self-abnegation,
it risks the very dramatic fall we have just witnessed in the Spitzer matter.
Does anyone think that even as well-heeled a divorcée as Mrs. Spitzer
would be the same force in philanthropic Upper East Side circles as the governor’s
wife?

It is true that Hillary Clinton managed to make lemonade out of her situation.
But that ending is the rare exception to the narrative that is likely to describe
Silda Wall Spitzer’s social fall. And it pays to remember that Clinton was a
mere six years away from her employment as a partner at the Rose Law Firm and
a mere three years away from being the lead player in the first round of national
health care when Bill took up with the intern. When she restarted her separate
life, campaigning for the Democrats in 1998, she was offering more than her
decade with a children’s birthday-party philanthropy. Her steely resolve in
face of Bill Clinton’s depredations did not hurt her, but it was not the only
asset she had.

Of course, the women who quit their jobs to tend their alpha-male husbands’
ambitions could just hire a private detective to follow him around all the time.
But I think I’d prefer the mergers and acquisitions practice myself.

Linda R. Hirshman retired as the Allen/Berenson Distinguished Visiting Professor
at Brandeis University. With almost no effort, she landed spot No. 77 on Bernard
Goldberg’s 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. She is the author of Get
to Work … And Get a Life Before It’s Too Late, and, recently, ” Sixteen
Ways of Looking at A Female Voter,” (NYT Magazine, Sunday, February 3,
2008).