Troy, Gil. Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady.

• Author: Kotlowski, Dean J.
• Position: Book review

First lady, senator from New York State, presidential candidate, and, if one has seen the opening scene of The Simpsons: The Movie, vice president of the United States in a White House headed by Itchy the Mouse. Such is the past, present, and fictional future of the most controversial female American politician of recent decades. The subtitle of Gil Troy's biography aptly labels Hillary Rodham Clinton a "polarizing" first lady. And yet, Troy's study also offers the reader something beyond biography, a window into the evolving position of first lady by one of the foremost historians of first couples.

The theme of Troy's study is the "many contradictions of Hillary Clinton." Far from being the frigid "feminazi," ridiculed by the talk-show host Rush Limbaugh (p. 117) or the principled, and oft-persecuted, liberal icon, Hillary Clinton, Troy asserts, "has consistently frustrated those who have tried to reduce her to one stereotype or another" (p. 4). According to Troy, Clinton was an intriguing figure whose "synthesis of Puritanism and Progressivism bolstered her husband's vision of a 'third way'" between laissez-faire conservatism and state-centered liberalism (p. 7). In the end, though, her "tempestuous tenure" left "a mixed impact" on the "office" of first lady (p. 3).

For Troy, Clinton's complexity originated early in her life. The daughter of Hugh Rodham, a harsh, self-made, politically conservative businessman, and Dorothy Rodham, a conventionally domestic wife, young Hillary saw the power that men can exercise over women and the divisions that frequently afflict marriages. She came to see herself as an agent of change, fortified by her Methodist faith which preached "a puritanical sense of mission" (pp. 15-16). Both her feminism and progressive liberalism blossomed during her years as an undergraduate at Wellesley College in the late 1960s, when she was a student leader. They strengthened during Hillary's time as a law student at Yale, where she met Marian Wright Edelman, an advocate of children's rights who became her mentor, and Bill Clinton, a law student who became her husband. Unlike Bill, however, Hillary struggled with the varied changes wrought by the Age of Aquarius. She remained "the Methodist good girl" who "imbibed the 1960s idealism more than its libertinism" (p. 20) while falling for and then marrying a womanizing "bad-boy type" (p. 32).

Hillary Clinton also wrestled with the paradox of being a career woman and a political...