Wendy Davis: An airbrushed life story

“Behind every successful woman is a good man,” said Rich Lowry in Politico.com. Ask Texas state legislator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who became a nationally famous feminist superhero last year by filibustering a state bill banning late-term abortions. Progressives were thrilled by Davis’s bootstrapping life story of a single teen mom who climbed from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to fierce public defender of legal abortion. Unfortunately, a recent Dallas Morning News article has revealed that her account fudged a few key facts. Davis was 21—not 19—when she divorced her first husband, and lived in a mobile home only briefly before marrying Jeff Davis, “a successful lawyer 13 years her senior.” He supported her and paid for most of her education, and when she left for Harvard, brought up her two daughters—including one from her first marriage. The day after Davis paid off her Harvard loan, she dumped him. So much for a “go-it-alone single mom.”

How unfair, said Margaret Carlson in Bloomberg.com. Davis prettied up some details, as do most people in telling their life stories, but the overall “arc of her life” was entirely accurate: She was a “dirt-poor,” young single mom who lived in a mobile home and a tiny apartment, and commuted as often as she could from Harvard to be with her kids while studying for a law degree. It was very much an “uphill climb.” But she still coldly airbrushed her second husband from her story, said Mona Charen in NationalReview.com. Why? Because as a feminist icon, Davis can’t bring herself to admit that her marriage was critical to her success, and that she ascended the way most people do—“through hard work and the support of a loving family.”

It’s not Davis’s fudged facts, but her ambition that conservatives really are attacking here, said Kirsten Powers in TheDailyBeast.com. The “misogynistic mob” now ganging up to destroy Davis’s political viability is demonizing her for her decision, as a mother, to prioritize her career. The same decision “would be unremarkable in a man,” said Liza Mundy in Politico.com. Leaving your kids in the “capable hands” of a loving spouse, “as Barack Obama did, as did zillions of other fathers who campaigned for public office,” is hardly unusual. It is, in fact, “the typical American success story.” When a woman does it, apparently, it’s “unnatural.”

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